Remember our series of Rifftides riffs and exchanges about applause? It started like this.
Then it went here
and here
In the past year and a half, the issue has not gone away. San Diego Union-Tribune classical music critic Valerie Scher’s Sunday, July 8 column bore the headline, “Think Before You Stand Up.” It began,

There’s a malady sweeping the nation that’s highly contagious to concertgoers. It doesn’t have a name yet, so let’s call it Excessive Ovation Syndrome (EOS for short). Those suffering from it stand and applaud at performances that aren’t good enough to deserve such enthusiasm. In extreme cases, they shout “Bravo!” during events that are best forgotten.

To read all of Ms. Scher’s case for restraining misplaced enthusiasm, go here.
Comments, as always, are welcome. If yours is for Valerie Scher, I’ll be happy to pass it along.

If you enjoyed the video montage of women in painting a few weeks ago, click here for act two; women in film. The cello accompanist is the same. I wonder who it is.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.–Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.–Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often–in fact, mostly–at the expense of everything else in my life.–Stan Getz

Readers of Safford Chamberlain’s An Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh–indeed, anyone interested in that staunch individualist among saxophonists–will want to investigate The Warne Marsh Site. The web pages developed by Rifftides reader Jack Goodwin include a thorough discography, a news section, photographs and a page called Global Warne-ing in which afficionados around the world exchange Marsh anecdotes and listening experiences.
The discography begins with a trio recording Marsh made at age fifteen with thirteen-year-old André Previn playing piano. It ends with a session three days before he died in 1987.
To sample Marsh’s latterday playing, see him in this video clip with Sal Mosca, Eddie Gomez and Kenny Clarke.

Terry Teachout, our favorite polymath arts blogger, has cleaned out and reorganized his clearinghouse of cultural blogs and websites, to my knowledge the most extensive such guide on the internet. It’s worth a look. For TT’s preamble to the revision, go here.
When you see the extent of his choices, it will be tempting to spend the rest of your life with Terry, but please come back.

Rifftides reader Don Emanuel alerted us to video of Supersax nineteen years ago at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. The band organized by Med Flory was devoted to Charlie Parker solos transcribed and harmonized for a saxophone section. It played them with accuracy and feeling that gave their treatment of Bird’s inventions a sense of improvised sponaneity. Often, a guest trumpeter was aboard to create new solos and provide contrast. Conte Candoli was on several Supersax recordings. In this case, the trumpet soloist is Steve Hufstetter.
The saxophonists, from screen left to right, are Jay Migliori, Ray Reed, Med Flory and Lanny Morgan. Baritone saxophonist Jack Nimitz is missing. The rhythm section is Lou Levy, piano; Monty Budwig, bass; and Larance Marable, drums. Supersax has had many imitators, but the original was best, and this is a rare opportunity to see them in performance. The song is “Just Friends.”

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.–Charlie Parker

If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.–Charles Mingus

In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I told of having heard Desmond’s “Take Five” on a music box in a Prague gift shop and in a number of other unlikely places including the Mexico City subway and my neighborhood gas station.

There are sheet music arrangements of “Take Five” for solo piano, brass band, chorus, accordian, guitar, flute choir, string orchestra, drum and percussion and–I swear–hand bells.

To the list of unusual performances of “Take Five” you may now add the 12 Girls Band live at Budokan. The short solo beginning a minute and four seconds into the performance seems truly improvised. As I watched this, I imagined Desmond’s grin if he could see it.
Thanks to Iola Brubeck for pointing out this treasure.

A message from Bill Crow:

Here’s a YouTube video I found, of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in Rome, 1959,
playing my tune.

Bill Crow

The composer is featured on bass. The trumpeter is Art Farmer, the drummer Dave Bailey. The Chinese Shadow Show effect is interesting. Just try to disregard the venetian-blind video and enjoy one of Mulligan’s greatest quartets playing Mr. Crow’s intriguing blues waltz.
While you’re in YouTube territory, why not listen to the same group on the same occasion playing Mulligan’s “Spring is Sprung,” a blues of another color.

Frances Lynne, Remember (SSJ).
Often discussed but seldom heard, Ms. Lynne is a charming singer. She worked with Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond and Norman Bates in 1948. Recalling their time with her at the Geary Cellar and the Band Box, all of them told me that they were moved by her clarity, phrasing, feeling and interpretation of lyrics. She went on to sing, but not record, with the Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa bands and kept on singing after she married trumpeter John Coppola, a veteran of the Barnet, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands. Finally, in 1991, she recorded for their private label, Lark, with Coppola’s medium-sized orchestra, which included strings and French horn. The album had virtually no distribution when it was released in 1999 and still has little, but it has been nicely repackaged by the Japanese label SSJ and is available from at least one web site (click on the link in the title above).
Ms. Lynne includes the seldom-heard verses of several songs. In his liner note message, Brubeck tells her that at the Band Box “there were many times you gave me goosebumps.” It may have been singing like her treatment of the verses of Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and the Oscar Hammerstein’s-Jerome Kern song “Can I Forget You?” that affected him. The CD is all the more precious for the presence of a pair of rarities, Kern’s “The Touch of Your Hand” and Harry Warren’s “Spring Isn’t Everything,” beautifully sung by Ms. Lynne. The superb arrangements of a dozen classic songs are by Mike Abene, who also conducts. The classy bass and drums are by Bill Douglass and Eddie Marshall. Soloists are Abene on piano, trumpeters Coppola and Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist John Handy and–on alto sax and clarinet–Herbie Steward, one of the original Four Brothers of the Woody Herman Second Herd. Their vigor complements Ms. Lynne’s restraint and mature wistfulness. For most of us, Frances Lynne’s singing was mythical. This CD brings it happily to life.
For an account of the Geary Cellar-Band Box milieu long before there was a Dave Brubeck Quartet, see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.