In Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, I wrote this about the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster:

In the beginning his playing was modeled closely on the dramatic, sweeping, even grandiose, style of (Coleman) Hawkins. But over time, Webster pared away embellishments and rococo elements, while maintaining warmth and a big tone, and created a style that with force and clarity appeals directly to the emotions. Or, as the critic Martin Williams put it, Webster became a great soloist when “he accepted the limitations of his fingers and embouchure and became a simple and eloquent melodist.”

All of that came to mind when I ran across a piece of video of Webster playing in Europe with Oscar Peterson, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Tony Inzalaco. Webster could be cantankerous, intimidating; one of his nicknames was The Brute. When he wasn’t drinking, he was gentle. Look for the expression on Peterson’s face when Ben’s solo ends. It is emblematic of how other musicians reacted to Webster’s playing — and how they still do. Ben Webster died in Holland in 1973 not long after this video was made. The piece is “Perdido.” The picture quality is far higher than much internet video, so if you can watch if full-screen, please do. Here’s the link.
Go here and here for previous Rifftides posts about Ben Webster.

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have stayed together as the
Standards Trio for a quarter of a century. How? Why? Associated Press writer Charles J. Gans wondered, and spoke with the three. Here’s a little of what Jarrett told him:

If you meet the perfect other two people for your needs in a musical jazz situation, why would you force yourself to go around the corner and find two other people to play with?

Gans discloses the surprising information that except for one date when Paul Motian substituted on drums, Peackock and DeJohnette are the only two jazz musicians Jarrett has played with since 1983. To read his article, go here. To read the Rifftides take on the trio’s latest CD set, go here.

Marc Myers is devoting three days of his excellent Jazz Wax blog to a discussion of the Paul Desmond Quartet with Jim Hall. I have the honor of being his guest discusser. We talk about the RCA Victor recordings and the earlier Warner Bros album of the Desmond quartet. This is a link to the first installment.
I was surprised in searching the internet to see that although the individual RCA albums and single-CD compilations are generally available, the box set of the complete recordings is becoming hard to find. The Warner Bros album, originally titled First Place Again and once reissued as East Of The Sun, seems to be available only as a bootleg import CD. I suppose that is better than not having it available at all. Some recordings, like some books, should be in print forever.
A part of the Q & A with Myers concerns Desmond’s musical relationship with Dave Brubeck. I tried to give some insight, but language is inadequate to describe music. The best understanding of music, and therefore of musical relationships, is gained through listening. In the case of Desmond and Brubeck, this 1959 performance in Rome takes us a long way. The piece is “These Foolish Things,” whioh they transformed together for decades. It is a fine demonstration of Brubeck’s skill as an ideal accompanist for Desmond. Desmond’s solo is so good that when it ends even he seems pleased, a rare occurence.

Terry Teachout is making progress on his biography of Louis Armstrong. He just wrote a chapter in three days Take it from a writer; that’s blazing progress. He gives a sample on his blog. Among other things, it deals with Armstrong’s life on the road and with Henry “Red” Allen, recently a Rifftides subject. To read the excerpt on TT’s About Last Night, go here. I am looking forward to that book.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

One year ago, the pianist George Cables gave his listeners a moment of music so vivid that I was moved to write of it,

…he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive.

You may go here to read about that concert.
Cables’ playing that night was extraordinary, but it was plain to everyone in the audience that he was unwell–drastically underweight, moving to the piano with difficulty. On dialysis for years, he had undergone it that very day.
Dialysis was a part of his routine on the road until his illness made staying on the road impossible. Last fall, he underwent a simultaneous liver and kidney transplant. Cables has been recuperating at home. He has a long way to go to recovery, and an enormous medical debt to meet. To help, friends have arranged two nights of benefit performances at the Greenwich Village, New York, club called Sweet Rhythm. So far, twenty-three prominent musicians are donating their talents. No doubt there will be more. Here are details sent by the organizers:

The New York All-Star Benefit for George Cables
FRIDAY JANUARY 25 and SATURDAY JANUARY 26
SETS: 8, 10, MIDNIGHT, 2AM
$25 per set and $10 minimum
SWEET RHYTHM
88 7th Ave S
New York, NY 10014
(212) 255-3626

Kenny Barron,
Randy Brecker,
Michael Carvin,
Joe Chambers,
Sonny Fortune,
Billy Harper,
Winard Harper,
Louis Hayes,
Vincent Herring,
Pete LaRoca,
Peter Leitch,
Victor Lewis,
Ronnie Mathews,
Cecil McBee,
Eric Reed,
Rufus Reid,
James Spaulding,,
Steve Turre,
Cedar Walton,
Buster Williams,
Steve Wilson,
Lenny White,
Reggie Workman

Reservations are strongly advised
www.sweetrhythmny.com
If you can’t attend, and would like to contribute please visit: www.georgecables.com . The George Cables Healing Fund has been set up where all contributions (with the exception of PayPal deductions) go directly to George, or you can send a check in any amount payable to:
GEORGE CABLES
c/o JazzCorner.com
245 West 25th St. #2F
New York, NY 10001

There is little internet video of Cables, but this ten-minute clip of “Alone Together” at an Italian festival last summer captures him in fine fettle. The other players are identified in the box to the right of the little YouTube video screen.

Even if I am fighting my way out of a thicket of deadlines, as I am at the moment, when a Jim Ferguson CD arrives, I stop what I’m doing and listen to it. Fortunately for the viability of the exchequer, that doesn’t happen often. The most recent Ferguson album came the day before yesterday. The previous one arrived seven years ago.
The new CD is Mundell Lowe & Jim Ferguson, Haunted Heart (Lily’s Dad’s Music). The record company, if that’s not too grand a term, is Ferguson’s. He is Lily’s dad. Lily is pictured in the painting on the cover. Ferguson is self-effacing in that way, and also in giving credit; you’ll notice that he put Mundell Lowe’s name first. That no doubt reflects the respect he has for the guitarist, who was a mainstay of jazz in New York before Ferguson was born in 1950. Ferguson has spent much of his working musical life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is in considerable demand in recording studios and television as a singer and as a bassist. Like Jay Leonhart and Kristin Korb, he sings and plays the bass at the same time. If I owned a concert hall, I’d hire the three of them to perform together. For now, however, I am content to listen to the magic that he and Lowe discovered a few years ago when they first toured together.
In his fine notes for the album, Richard M. Sudhalter writes, “A high tenor male voice is a rarity in professional music these days, and the tendency is not to take it seriously…..” Ferguson must be taken seriously because his musicianship is as powerful in his singing as in his playing. From the instant vocal swing he achieves on the propulsion of Lowe’s four-bar introduction of “Gone With The Wind” to the close of the CD with one unelaborated chorus of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Ferguson’s singing is without flaw. His bass playing finds the right groove on every one of the eleven songs, and it seems to me that his swing, singing and playing on “Mean To Me” combine in a little masterpiece. His bass work is as agile as he wants to make it, but in solo he does not indulge in fingerboard gymnastics. Ferguson and Lowe work beautifully together. Lowe’s skill and inventiveness are firmly intact as he approaches his eighty-sixth year. That is evident in his solo features, “There’s A Small Hotel” and his own “Big Star, Little Star.” This is a kind and quality of chamber music we don’t hear much any more, two masters of the art just playing, with no gimmick and no intent beyond making music.
The songs include “Haunted Heart,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Detour Ahead” and Mose Allison’s “I Don’t Worry About A Thing,” which Ferguson personalizes simply by being Ferguson. He is almost unbearably moving in his vocals on Bill Evans’ and Gene Lees’ “Waltz For Debby” and that modern classic by Johnny Mandel and Paul Williams, “Close Enough For Love.”
It’s a joy to see Dick Sudhalter’s byline again. If you’re a Rifftides regular, you know what he’s been going through. If you’re not, there are several archive pieces about him, including this one. For background on Jim Ferguson beyond that in Dick’s notes, see this biography.

Pete Candoli was an iron man in an iron-man calling. He played lead trumpet in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton, Les Brown, Count Basie, Freddy Slack, Tex Beneke, Jerry Gray, Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman…among others. He became famous as Superman With A Horn in Woody Herman’s First Herd of 1945 and ’46. Later, he co-led a group with his younger brother Conte. He was a mainstay in the recording studios and on the sound stages of Hollywood. News of Pete Candoli’s death January 11th at the age of 84 was made public today. Conte died in 2001.

Conte and Pete Candoli

Rifftides Readers sometimes send useful tips. Here are three:
Pianist Emil Viklický called our attention to this YouTube clip of him and two other Czech musicians sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in a 1990 concert. In a moment of geographic confusion, Diz introduces them as our “Yugoslav brothers.” The other Czechs are saxophonist Jiri Stivin, who plays a startling solo on pennywhistle, and trumpeter Juraj Bartos. Paquito D’Rivera is also aboard, on clarinet and alto. The bassist is John Lee, the drummer Ignacio Berroa. Does anyone recognize the tenor saxophonist? There is a guitarist whom we hear but never clearly see. Dizzy introduces the piece as “Straight, No Chaser.” That melody line never materializes, and they end with “Billie’s Bounce,” but we get ten entertaining minutes of the blues in F and a reminder that no one was better than Gillespie at setting riffs behind a soloist.
Saxophonist David Liebman
sent the following radio information:

I am being interviewed on the Musician’s Show tomorrow (Wednesday-Jan 16 at 6PM-Eastern time in the U.S.) on the illustrious jazz station WKCR-FM broadcast from Columbia University in New York. I will be playing the music that shaped my aesthetic over the years. As I write now, I am putting together the music, which will include my first influences and teachers (Elvis, Tristano, Charles Lloyd) to the main saxophonists (Wayne Shorter, Trane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Joe Henderson); Miles and Bill Evans of course; world and classical music (Chopin, Beethoven and Bartok) as well as a few of my things and one track from a live gig that Quest just did a few months ago (Richie Beirach, Ron McClure, Billy Hart). Quest is playing Birdland in New York Feb 6-9. The show is three hours and hopefully the interviewer will be cool. You can google it and tune in anywhere in the world I believe. (I assume it will be archived).

To hear the program, tune in 89.9 FM in New York or listen on the web by going here.
Saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader and broadcaster
Bill Kirchner’s next Jazz From The Archives on WBGO radio will feature the singer and bassist Jim Ferguson, a world-class musician who might be better known if he lived in New York or Los Angeles. Ferguson is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Kirchner writes:

We’ll hear recordings of Ferguson performing solo, with two quartets (accompanied by tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianists Pat Coil or Stefan Karlsson, and drummer Jim White), and in duo with the veteran guitarist Mundell Lowe. The show will air this Sunday, January 20, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

In the New York area, WBGO is at 88.3 FM. On the internet, go here. Before the week is out, I expect to have a Rifftides item about the Mundell Lowe/Jim Ferguson CD.

It was a piano weekend in apple, wine and snow country in the shadow of the Cascade mountains. Two of the premier jazz pianists of the twenty-first century played here. Fresh from Los Angeles, Jan Lundgren had just recorded for Fresh Sound Records a trio CD of the music of Ralph Rainger. Bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe LaBarbera, who were on the record session, did not make the trip north.
The Swedish pianist had one rehearsal Saturday afternoon with Seattle bassist Jon Hamar and Don Kinney, principal percussionist of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra and a seasoned jazz drummer. In an interview at the rehearsal, Kinney told a television reporter, “Sixteen bars into the first tune, I felt as if I’d been playing with this guy all my life.” That’s how the three sounded Saturday night at The Seasons performance hall. It was a demonstration that under the right circumstances, the universal language common to experienced jazz musicians can bind the best of them together even on short notice.
Lundgren chose one of Rainger’s best-known songs, “Easy Living,” a cross-section of great American songbook pieces by Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter, Kaper, Ellington, Monk and Don Redman, and a pair of traditional Swedish songs including “Ach Warmeland du Skona” (aka “Dear Old Stockholm”). He dazzled the audience with his technique and his warmth. All hands got plenty of solo time, and the ad hoc Lundgren trio got a standing ovation.
Sunday afternoon,Jessica Williams
played a private concert at the home of a fan who is also a pianist. On a small grand piano in a big living room packed with guests, she marked a return to her fascination with Thelonious Monk. One of the most engaging and skilled of Monk interpreters, Williams told her listeners that she had made an effort to move away from his music because for a time she wondered “where Jessica had gone.” Not far, evidently; she and Monk were in perfect synch, the qualities of each on full display, nowhere more powerfully than in her composition “Monk’s Hat.” She premiered a new section of her recent “Freedom Suite,” dedicated to the young Americans who serve in the Iraq war. “This is not a political statement,” she said. “It’s a tribute to those boys and girls.” The melody, in long tones over an ostinato figure, was a meditation, a reflection, quite unlike anything else she played in the recital. Williams found a spellbinding medium-tempo groove for “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” The two-hour recital ended with “I Love You, Sweetheart Of All My Dreams,” a 1926 pop chestnut that Monk once recorded unaccompanied. It was laced with his humor, her humor and stride passages that might have come from James P. Johnson. Williams’s altered changes would certainly have made James P. sit up and take notice–and smile.