There is a baritone saxophonist in Spain who sounds amazingly like Gerry Mulligan. Rifftides reader Tyler Newcomb sent the alert:

Man, that Joan Chamorro plays so much like Gerry, if you closed your eyes you’d swear it was him. Plays just behind the beat like Mulligan, improvises the same type of lines and ideas, and his sound is drop-dead the same. All he needs is some red hair to go on tour with a Chet Baker clone and recreate the original Quartet.

This is a link to Chamorro’s quartet playing, “Bernie’s Tune,” “Love Me Or Leave Me” and, somewhat less successfuly, “Makin’ Whoopee.” All of the pieces were staples of the early Mulligan quartet repertoire. The tape runs out before “Love Me Or Leave Me” finishes. The other players are Toni Belenguer, trombone; David Mengual, bass; and David Xirgu, drums. Chamorro’s channeling of Mulligan is uncanny, but for originality of ideas, pay close attention to Belenguer. Things are happening in Barcelona. The video opens with less than a minute of Ben Webster’s tune “Go Home.”
Searching the web for more about Chamorro, I came across this short video clip of him playing the bass saxophone not on a stand, as most bass saxophonists do, but holding the monster–a feat in itself. Maybe confining his playing to the baritone range makes the horn seem lighter.

You Tube may have removed all of its Chet Baker videos, but it turns out that there is still Baker to be seen and heard on the web. Two days late, we are able to link you, after all, to a Japanese site that has Chet singing and playing “My Funny Valentine” in a superior performance from late in his career. Only the bassist, Heyn Ven De Geyn, is identified. The pianist is likely to be Harold Danko. If you know who the drummer is, please send an e-mail message.
Comment
Ty Newcomb writes:

LINE-UP:
Chet Baker – trumpet, vocal.
Harold Danko – piano
Hein van de Gein – bass
John Engels – drums

(I thought that solo sounded familiar. It is available on a CD, the brilliant Chet Baker In Tokyo. Recorded in 1987, the year before he died, his playing on that concert is proof that even toward the end of his life, which was a study in self abuse, Baker was never a burnt-out case musically. — DR)

First Published July 8, 2005

A reader of Rifftides or Take Five (both, I hope) has been listening to Jim Hall’s 1974 Concierto CD in which Hall’s sidemen are Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. She sent a message asking a question at which musicians tend to guffaw when civilians ask it, one that arises out of genuine interest and does not deserve scorn. Here’s the exchange:
Q: The track “Concierto de Aranjuez” is hauntingly beautiful. Do the musicians totally improvise, or do they each have a kind of musical outline around which they create? You can guess from the question I’m not a musician, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.
A. Except in the most unfettered avant garde improvisation, there must be a plan or the result will be random noise, which, come to think of it, describes the most unfettered avant garde improvisation. Virtually every piece of music has some sort of tonal organization, whether or not there is a formal chord structure. In the case of “Concierto” on the Jim Hall album, the musicians improvise around the simple and quite lovely harmonies that Joaquin Rodrigo wrote into the adagio section of his famous “Concierto de Aranjuez.”

There’s more. To read the whole thing, go here.
Comment

Was she the cousin of the airline stew who asked PD, “How many people are there in your quartet?”?
Concierto is my nomination for the greatest jazz combo LP/CD in the most recent generation (since 1975). Not only their jazz version of the Aranjuez second movement, but also “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” the lead track, I think. Baker-Desmond counterpoint, Steve Gadd’s fills gloved to the soloists’ lines, Roland Hanna flying effortlessly in the last of the solo turns….
Charlton Price

“My Funny Valentine” was one of Chet Baker’s signature songs, and I’d love to give you a link to a clip of him singing or playing it. Sorry, that’s not possible. A few days ago You Tube removed all of its Baker videos because of a copyright wrangle, so I looked to see who else they have performing the piece. It turns out there are dozens of versions on You Tube, maybe hundreds; I quit sampling them after the fourteenth page. You may have better things to do than roam through all of the possibilities, so here are links to six of the better ones. To watch, click on the name of the performer.
J.J Johnson with Rob Schneiderman, piano; Rufus Reid, bass; Akira Tana, drums.
Keith Jarrett, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums.
Duke Ellington’s band with solos by Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet, and Quentin Jackson, trombone.
Paolo Fresu, Flugelhorn, assisted by an unidentified trumpeter who may be Franco Ambrosetti.
Wynton Marsalis in 1980 at age 19, with Art Blakey’s band. The pianist is James Williams.
Tony Bennett with Buddy Rich, drums; Ralph Sharon, piano; an unidentified tenor saxophonist and a bassist who looks like John Burr.
Happy Valentine’s Day.

If you live in or plan to visit the Washington, DC, area, you may be interested in this communique from a Rifftides reader:

There is a fabulous exhibit titled “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World” coming up at the Meridian International Center in Washington, DC. Aside from material covered in Penny Von Eschen’s book*, there will be previously-not-publicly-shown photos on display. Here is a link to the exhibit:
Katja

*Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard)

Whether sponsored by the State Department or off to see the world on their own, the Dave Brubeck Quartet practiced their share of cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and ’60s. You Tube, that never-ending source of surprises and occasional frustrations, has come up with video of the DBQ on a 1962 Australian television program. The story goes that the tape of the show was lost for more than two decades and barely saved from destruction once it was found. It includes contrived conversations that, like the host’s introductions, sound scripted. Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello appear amused by the awkward show-biz schtick. Their playing is correspondingly light-hearted.
The program includes a rarity in the Brubeck canon, a guest vocalist, Laurie Loman, who manages to lose track of the number of bars in “When You’re Smiling.” Unfazed, Desmond follows with a solo on a song he may have been playing for the first time. He works in a quote from “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” perfect for the circumstances. The program is divided into seven You Tube segments, all of which you will find on this page.
Brubeck disbanded the quartet in 1967, so he could devote his time and energy to composing long-form works. The next year he completed his oratorio The Light In The Wilderness, which he still presents when he can marshal the musical troops it requires. He gave the piece its fortieth-anniversary performance last night in Athens, Georgia. As usual, his wife is on the road with him. In The Atlanta Journal-Constituion Bo Emerson has a story about Brubeck working with an orchestra and chorus to prepare the piece.

Iola Brubeck is in the adjoining room at the Holiday Inn in Athens, working on a laptop, busy writing the history of the man she married 65 years ago. A laptop? Dave Brubeck doesn’t mess around with that kind of keyboard. Says his longtime conductor Russell Gloyd, “Dave has trouble with the pause button on his tape player.”
The tape player may outfox him, but Brubeck handles larger forces with aplomb. During a weeklong residency at the University of Georgia, which continues through Friday, he will (with Gloyd’s assistance) command a 140-voice choir, a full-sized symphony orchestra, a big band, a jazz vocal ensemble and his quartet.

To read all of Emerson’s story, go here.
Comment On The Australian Video

In 1962 I was still at school in New Zealand,and I flew up from my home
town to Auckland in a DC-3 so I could see the concert.
They must have gone to New Zealand either before or after the Australia
tour.
I still have the program somewhere!
John Pickworth

Dave Frishberg asks in one of his songs, Do You Miss New York? Yes, I do, every day. So it was a pleasure to get a small New York fix from an unexpected source, an e-mail ad from a clothing store. The tour through a favorite part of lower Manhattan made me homesick for one of my many former hometowns. To take it yourself, click here. Rifftides has no stock in or connection with Ralph Lauren Rugby, but for making me feel good Ralph gets a plug. Full disclosure: I once bought a shirt there. On sale.

Several years ago, I quit the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in frustration over the academy’s treatment of jazz. I returned my dues statement with the notation that I needed the $75 more than Celine Dione did. If anything, jazz has been shoved further down the ladder since then. The jazz categories in the awards list start at number 45, and they begin with what the academy members obviously think is the most important, “Best Contemporary Jazz Album,” often populated with oatmeal-music nominees, but — to give due credit — this year it had albums of greater substance than usual. The winner in that category was Herbie Hancock’s River:The Joni Letters, which also won the overall album-of-the-year award for all categories.
Clearly, the academy voters were paying tribute to Joni Mitchell at least as much as they were recognizing Hancock, but the outcome is good for both of them. It may even stir a bit of general interest in jazz, although I’m skeptical about that. As I pointed out in this month’s Picks, River contains some of Hancock’s and saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s best playing together, but that’s not why it won the big award. It won because the academy has a pop mentality and its members regarded River as a pop album. Good. No harm done, and maybe something will rub off on other jazz artists, but I’m not going to deprive myself of oxygen while I wait for that to happen.
The only other jazz Grammy winner Rifftides reviewed was Maria Schneider’s sublime Sky Blue. One track, “Cerulean Skies,” won the award for best instrumental composition. Go here for a lengthy appreciation of Sky Blue and Ms. Schneider.
Michael Brecker’s posthumously released Pilgrimage won as best jazz instrumental album. I did not review the CD, but following Brecker’s death in January of 2007, there were several Rifftides items about him, including this long, loving tribute by Randy Sandke.

The artsjournal.com shop foreman tells me there is a good chance that the Rifftides comment section will be repaired and back in action by the end of the week. In the meantime, please use e-mail (that’s a link) to send your comments.

While the Rifftides comment capability is being repaired, we are relying on e-mail to receive your comments. Jim Brown writes from Santa Cruz, California:

From my rather distant perspective as a Baker fan, this very real spat seems to be the result of a big corporate entity (You Tube) being intimidated by the threat of a lawsuit based on copyright of material that they don’t care a whit about. While the wonderful jazz on YouTube is a delight to jazz fans, it isn’t even a pimple on the back side of owners of that site, and the potential costs of defending a lawsuit isn’t worth the hassle as compared with the loss of advertising on what must certainly be a minority audience.
Yes, an owner of copyright would be exercising lousy business judgement about this material being on YouTube — legal purchased copies are virtually always of significantly better quality. What these copyright owners OUGHT to be pursuing is setting up (or improving) legal distribution of the material they own, for profit or otherwise. I gladly purchase every jazz video I can find of artists I enjoy, and having clips on YouTube causes me to search them out!
Another important point re: the pimple aspect of this. The costs of mastering and distributing program material of interest to an audience that is a tiny minority of the public and limited avenues for distribution can easily exceed the income received from sales. About five years ago, my partner and I released two well recorded and well produced CD’s of Carmen McRae that got 4 and 4 1/2 stars in Down Beat. The musicians and the estate were paid. For a while, the CDs were in retail outlets like Tower and Borders. While I’ve got what I consider to be a very fair relationship with my partner, my share of the profits (about $700) have yet to approach my costs in recording the material. We have the rights to a third CD which is all Carmen accompanying herself at the piano, as well as to a fine performance by Sylvia Syms. Although both are mastered and ready to press, we currently don’t have a commercially viable way to distribute them that will pay the artists and have a chance of paying our costs!
Jim Brown
I want to thank you so much for your comments on the Baker controversy. I’m a friend of Naftali/Bob Levin and of Itsartolie, who had the best jazz channel on You Tube, and who was shut down because of this. He presented musicians in the most respectful and elegant way. If you ever watched his channel, you know this, of course.
Lorraine Jones

In the following communique, I have taken the liberty of minor editing in the interests of clarity or good taste.

Removing Chet Baker Performances from U-tube….WTF. This Guy is Almost completely forgotten as far as I’ve seen except for “My Funny Valentine”. I can’t tell you the last time I saw a CD ‘Bin-Slot’ in a Music Store for Chet Baker…..Really!! And these Idiots can’t seem to realize this is FREE Advertizing…Subscribers doing this for FREAKIN’ FREEEE!!! What is this Chet Baker Foundation ? Where did they come from ?? I read that Baker died almost a Pauper and NOW he has a Foundation?????? RU kidding me??????
CopyRight My A__….and this LEVIN ‘Suit’ prolly doesn’t realize it’s 2008….NOT 1958 either. I guess anywhere there’s a potential to squeeze a few PITTANCE you’re gonna have a few **wish Types recognize that potential. They can all go to hell!…. and removing Chet Baker from You Tube is completely INDEFENSIBLE. I hate them.
Thanks,
John
Lol. You did the best you could for both clarity and good taste, but alas, liquor wins every
time.
Bob Levin