One of my happiest assignments in recent months was writing the liner essay for a new CD by the New York composer, arranger and pianist Joan Stiles. She rounded up an all-star group of sidemen–Steve Wilson, Joel Frahm, Peter Washington, Jeremy Pelt and Lewis Nash–for Hurly-Burly. Her writing and the playing by all hands sparkle in pieces by Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Fats Waller, Jimmy Rowles, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Stiles herself. Consider this not a review, but a hot tip.
This is short notice, but Joan is going to be on the radio soon to talk about the CD with Vince Outlaw of KSDS radio in San Diego. That’s at 10:15 pm EDT, 7:15 PDT this evening. You can hear it by clicking here to get to the KSDS website and clicking on “Listen Now” on the right of your screen.

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.– Anthony Kennedy, US Supreme Court justice
The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.– William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court justice

For further appreciation of Benny Carter (see the next exhibit), here are links to three video performances of the alto saxophonist among his peers. The first two are from a Copenhagen night club in 1985 with Carter’s contemporary Red Norvo on vibraharp, pianist Horace Parlan, bassist Jesper Lundgaard, and drummer Ed Thigpen. You’ll hear and see them in “Sunny Side of the Street” and then, without Norvo, in Carter’s classic “When Lights Are Low.”
Next, so long that You Tube had to run it in two parts, is “Autumn Leaves” from a Jazz At The Philharmonic concert at the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival. The players are Carter, Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, Zoot Sims, Joe Pass, Tommy Flanagan, Keter Betts and Bobby Durham. For both halves of this stirring jam session, go here and then here. Listening to their inspired playing, seeing the interaction, mutual appreciation and love among these guys–all of them but Terry and Durham gone–made me a little moist around the eyes.
Benny Carter, Part Three
Thanks to Terri Hinte for calling my attention to a conversation between Carter and Mel Martin, videotaped during the 1993 San Francisco Jazz Festival. Martin had more success getting Benny to talk about himself than I ever had when writing about him (“I’m not much interested in nostalgia”). He quickly converted Martin’s answers to questions about him into observations about others, and did it with his elegant sense of humor. To see what amounts to a semi-mini-documentary put together by Bret Primack, click here.

Benny Carter was born in New York City on August 8, 1907. He died in 2003 less than a month before his 96th birthday. Observances of Carter’s centennial include a Hollywood Bowl concert on his birthday and the release of two new CDs. Welcome and deserved as they may be, those events are slight recognition of an artist whose broad gifts and creative consistency graced and influenced music for seven decades.

Benny Carter
Here’s a little of what I wrote about Carter in the notes for Three Great Swing Saxophonists, a 1989 CD that included some of his best work from 1929 to 1941.

At the height of his career, he played alto, tenor, clarinet and trumpet, composed, arranged, and sometimes played piano and sang. He is–along with Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker–one of the three great original alto sylists in jazz. He wrote arrangements in the mid-’30s that sound fresh today. He was a natural born leader and teacher and one of the most important catalysts in jazz history. At the age of 81, as this is written, Carter plays elegant alto, and trumpet when he feels like it. He was deeply involved in a 1988 concert of his music by the American Jazz Orchestra, which he rehearsed to within an inch of its life. He travels the world as a performer and writes music with today and tomorrow in mind. He refuses to discuss his past triumphs, explaining simply but firmly, “I’m not much interested in nostalgia.”

Parker, Hodges, Carter
One of the new albums is among the last Carter made as a saxophonist, the other a tribute to Carter by more than a dozen of his colleagues and admirers. The San Francisco tenor saxophonist Mel Martin struck up a friendship with Carter in the late 1980s and became a sort of musical Boswell to Carter’s Johnson, featuring and promoting Carter compositions in his own performances. He went Boswell one better and collaborated in a full partnership with the great man he so admired. That resulted in a 1994 engagement at the Oakland music emporium Yoshi’s and the Martin-Carter quintet CD Just Friends. The rhythm section–pianist Roger Kellaway, bassist Jeff Chambers and drummer Harold Jones–is superb. Carter and Martin play to and for one another with relaxation and an infectious sense of fun. Some of the pieces, “Perdido,” “Secret Love,” “Just Friends,” have the air of a jam session about them, but any jam session involving Benny Carter had underlying order. The CD includes two gorgeous, little-heard Carter pieces, “People Time” and “Elegy in Blue.”
The Benny Carter Centennial Project presents, in various combinations, musicians including Phil Woods, Randy Sandke, Warren Vaché, Bill Kirchner, Joe Wilder, John Coates, Loren Schoenberg, James Chirillo, Russell Malone and Carter’s last rhythm section–Chris Neville, piano; Steve LaSpina, bass; and Steve Johns, drums. All of the compositions are Carter’s, and he makes a rare appearance without a saxophone.
In ubiquity, urbanity and skill, if not in style, Woods is a younger counterpart of Carter. He and Carter were fast friends and recorded together memorably on several occasions. In the Centennial Project, he contributes achingly beautiful duets with pianist Coates on the ballads “Johnny” and “Other Times.” On soprano saxophone, Bill Kirchner combines delicacy and deep understanding of Carter’s melodic essence in his reading of the master’s longtime theme song, “Melancholy Lullaby.” A five-man sax section headed by Schoenberg rolls out perfectly interpreted performances of two of Carter’s greatest arrangements, “I’m Coming Virginia” and “All of Me.”
Trumpeters Vaché and Sandke nail the spirit of “I’m in the Mood for Swing,” best known for the ingenuity and propulsion of Carter’s sax section writing in a 1938 Lionel Hampton all-star recording with Harry James shining in solo. Sandke in “Again and Again” and Vaché in “Key Largo” team with the rhythm section for solo spots. In “Far Away,” “Echo of My Dream” and “South Side Samba,” Neville, LaSpina and Johns display the lightness and firmness that Carter appreciated in them as accompanists. Neville rolls out his modern stride in “Fable of a Fool.” The final track is “All About You,” a ballad Carter wrote toward the end of his life and presented to guitarist Malone. Malone plays it alone, followed by Carter’s version on piano in 2001. It was his last recording, and he plays the piece with a tenderness that makes me wonder if he was more interested in nostalgia than he let on.
Here is a list of a few Carter CDs that I recommend.
All Of Me: Essential Carter from the 1930s and ’40s, with a smattering of his M Squad TV music of the 1950s.
Django Reinhardt All Star Sessions: Carter in Europe in the 1930s with the great guitarist and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. This includes celebrated versions of “Crazy Rhythm” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”
They All Had Rhythm – ’45 and ’46 and Groovin’ High in L.A. 1946: Compilations including Carter’s big band, plus Jimmy Mundy’s, Gerald Wilson’s and Wilbert Baranco’s. Great arranging and playing by Carter, and fiery young soloists including, on Groovin’ High in L.A., Miles Davis.
Jazz Giant: Brilliant in every respect. With Ben Webster, Jimmy Rowles, André Previn, Frank Rosolino, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinegar and Shelly Manne.
Further Definitions: Carter’s masterpiece of the early 1960s, with Coleman Hawkins, Phil Woods, Charlie Rouse and a powerhouse rhythm section. If you were limited to a collection of ten CDs, this would have to be one of them.
There are dozens of other Carter recordings. It would difficult to go wrong with any of them. You may want to go here and browse.

Jazz blogs are proliferating. Two recent entries worth investigating are Marc Myers’s JazzWax, whose current posting is an evaluation of Benny Carter, and Chicago bassist Bill Harrison’s Jazz Underneath.

Carol Sloane’s blog piece about her short career in music academia recently inspired a Rifftides item about singers who misfire. Sloane’s followup story recounts the time early in her career when she shared a bill with Oscar Peterson and impressed him, in a way.

I was singing at THE Village Vanguard; I was opening for one of the world’s greatest JAZZ pianists. Was I not therefore A JAZZ SINGER??? And what do jazz singers do? They improvise! To hell with a boring, simple melody. It needed some embellishment, some “jazzing up”. And so I commenced to work around, above and below the line every time I sang it. After one or two of these seriously flawed attempts to improve on Mr. Weill’s melody, Oscar took notice.
He’d say: “Carol. Sing “My Ship”, and of course I was flattered that my rendition so impressed the Great Man. He’d sit in the shadows on the banquette just to my left. Each night I sang with my usual abandon, and each night I’d eagerly look toward him, expecting acknowledgement for my inventiveness. Instead, his was a dead-pan expression, PopEye-like biceps firmly fixed across his expansive upper torso. Buddha displeased.

To get the whole story, go here.

The Rifftides staff is up against non-Rifftides deadlines. Rather than abandon you, we offer links to Lionel Hampton videos. You can use them in lieu of your morning coffee to perk you up, or benzedrine to keep you awake. The piece is “Flying Home,” which was to Hampton what home runs are to Barry Bonds and tie-breaking goals to Beckham.
The first version is from the 1960s. It has solos by Hamp and the very young baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber, playing with ferocity. The second is from a 1957 TV program hosted by the singer Patti Page. Hamp plays his patented solo, familiar but always swinging, until the full band comes in for the last chorus. The most remarkable thing about this performance is the driving bass playing of Milt Hinton. The only other sideman I can identify is Billy Mackel, Hampton’s guitarist for decades. He is a co-conspirator in swing with Hinton and the drummer, whose face is lost in shadow.
Seat belts, please.

The guest on Marian McPartland’s current edition of Piano Jazz is alto saxophonist Bud Shank. Engaging talk and fine quartet playing, including one of the fastest versions of “Beautiful Love” you’re likely to encounter. Go here.

This turned out to be Italian Sunday. My frequent companion Vigorelli Bianchi and I went for a twenty-mile ride full of ups, downs and early morning beauty in the hills of orchard country. Back home, I wrapped up a two-day ciabatta project and baked four loaves, then made a dinner that also featured salmon, pasta with pesto and a homey 2000 La Loggia Barolo from Trader Joe’s. The wine is not a triumph of the Piedmont, but it worked with the meal. A classic (read expensive) Barolo would have fought with the salmon. The La Loggia was a bit pinot noirish and suited the fish and the pasta. For dessert, we had gelato and espresso.
The music I listened to in the kitchen was off the paisan track: Rostropovich playing Bach’s solo cello suites. No matter. When you’re in love with a day like this, the whole world’s Italian.

A year and a half ago a Rifftides report on the conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators included this paragraph:

It is impossible to predict the course of an artist’s career, but here’s a name to file away: Logan Strosahl. He is a sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band from Seattle, Washington. Strosahl has the energy of five sixteen-year-olds, rhythm that wells up from somewhere inside him, technique, harmonic daring with knowledge to support it and–that most precious jazz commodity–individuality. If he learns to control the whirlwind and allow space into his improvising, my guess is that you’ll be hearing from Logan Strosahl.

I heard Strosahl again last winter in a student adjudication at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho. For his appearance before the judges, he did not choose pushover pieces with easy harmonic structures; he played Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Strosahl won a top evaluation, and response as close to an ovation as anyone is likely to get from an audience mainly composed of educators and competitors. For a short biography, click here.

Logan Strosahl
Last night at The Seasons Summer Festival in a concert billed as The Future of Jazz, I heard Strosahl again, not in the anxiety-inducing circumstance of an academic exercise but in a full-fledged gig. Leading a band called the Playtonic Quartet, in an hour’s performance he accomplished–at greater length and in greater depth–everything that prompted my enthusiasm for him in New York. With a rhythm section notable for its sensitivity and responsiveness, Strosahl showed that he has grown. Like Strosahl, bassist Jeff Picker is a national award winner in student music events and about to enter the Manhattan School of Music. Strosahl is off to the New England Conversatory in Boston, where, I predict, he will quickly gain notice when he takes time from his composition studies to jam in the city’s clubs. Pianist Victor Noriega and drummer Chris Icasiano, bright lights in the young adult division of Seattle’s jazz scene, were impressive in support and in solo.
Evidence of Strosahl’s increasing maturity included the opening up of space in his solos; pauses that allowed his ideas breathing room and emphasized the melodic and rhythmic content, including humor, in his choruses. His improvised lines have logic, continuity and originality, with a fine edge of freedom and wildness. His mastery of the saxophone and of harmony evidently allow him to play any idea that comes into his head. Tall and slender, with wide shoulders, he cannot repress the urge to stay in motion. Strosahl moved about the stage in movements between jerking and gliding, pausing to listen intently to his bandmates, uttering syllables of encouragement or approval, then resuming his ballet, often while playing, a thick crop of dark hair flopping over his forehead.
His time feeling is so strong that on a couple of occasions when someone in the rhythm section drifted almost imperceptibly out of plumb, all it took was two or three perfectly placed quarter notes from Strosahl to get things back on course. That is a technique well known to seasoned horn players, evidence of natural leadership in one so young. His improvisation on “It Could Happen to You” was, simply, one of the most satisfying solos I have heard in years. He showed judgment in program construction, with a balance between original compositions and standards to which the audience could relate. In his announcements, he was brief, good natured and informative, if a bit rushed in his delivery.
Strosahl is the son of Pat Strosahl, the driving force behind his family’s conversion of The Seasons from a church into one of the finest performance halls in the west. If this was a case of fatherly favoritism, it was one that could give nepotism a good name.