Rifftides reader Jon Foley recommends a YouTube clip of the Dave Brubeck Quartet with the comment, “They were in a good mood that night!”
They sure were. I thought that we had linked to this performance before, but I can find no trace of it in the archive. The clip isn’t dated, but it is amost certainly from the quartet’s 25th anniversary reunion tour in 1976. The piece is “Three To Get Ready.” I have no idea what set off the merriment, but the silliness was contagious and brought out Brubeck’s inner Cecil Taylor. To join in the fun, click here.

If you are new to Blogville and wonder what those underlined words in blue are all about, you should know that they are links. When you click on a link, you are spirited away from Rifftides to another place on the internet that amplifies, explains or demonstrates the linked term. Happily for Rifftides, all you have to do is close out of the linked site to get back to home base.
Perhaps you’d like to try it. Click on this link. You will be rewarded.
(Pause)
Welcome back. That was Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927, playing “Hotter Than That.” It is a recording not discussed as often or as deeply as other Hot Fives; “West End Blues” or “Cornet Chop Suey,” as examples. The jazz scholar William R. Bauer is doing something about that. Professor Bauer is writing a book that will analyze Armstrong’s early work and pay particular attention to the astonishing cornet and vocal solos in “Hotter Than That.” The book, The Early Recordings of Louis Armstrong: The Codification of Jazz Performance Practice, will be published by Scarecrow Press in 2008.
That makes two important Armstrong books in the works. My artsjournal.com colleague Terry Teachout (see the item titled Coherence) is writing a full-scale Armstrong biography, also targeted for publication next year. If you had no reason to look forward to 2008, you now have two reasons.

From time to time, Rifftides Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard reports on musical events in the US Capital City.

NO STEREOTYPES, PLEASE
The Smithsonian Jazz Café hosted a 70th birthday celebration for guitarist Gene Bertoncini on Friday, April 20th. What words come to mind when you think of Bertoncini? Taste, quiet beauty, delicacy? All true. But it was a different Gene Bertoncini on display Friday night. The Café was packed and LOUD. The place attracts a blend of true jazz fans, tourists looking for a meal and a place to sit down after a week of schlepping through national landmarks and monuments, and folks looking for something different to do on a Friday night. The mix is not conducive to the nurturing of hothouse flowers.
One can’t be sure what he was thinking as he stepped before the chattering crowd, but what came out of Bertoncini’s guitars was surely designed to deal with the evening’s reality. We got a side of the man we hadn’t heard before. Tasteful, yes. Elegant, sure. But also strong and swinging. He turned up the amp and appeared to have fun.
Accompanied by two Washington area musicians – bassist Tommy Cecil and drummer Chuck Redd – Bertoncini scored with standards such as “I’ll Remember You”, “Gone With the Wind” and a nice medley, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and “It Might as Well be Spring”.
The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, long a part of Bertoncini’s repertoire, closed the first set and showed the guitarist still willing to take risks and solve self-imposed challenges. He tried a solo version of Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”, but it drowned in a sea of babble and laughter. Not the time or the place for subtlety.
The closer for the second set was Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Bertoncini played the hell out of it, piling chord upon chord, finding odd voicings to lead in fresh directions, conducting interplay with Cecil and Redd with head nods, eye contact and grins.
As I headed for home, I was thinking about this “different” side of a musician I had long ago pigeonholed. And, I thought, “Who’s limited here – him or me?” You don’t get to be 70 years old and perform as a professional jazz musician all these years by being a hothouse flower. You adapt, you overcome, you live to play another day.
So, hats off to the Birthday Boy – and to all who earn a living making art in difficult circumstances.

–John Birchard

The British musician Graham Collier is an astute observer and a good writer. (Rifftides recently reviewed one of his early recordings.) In the current entry on his web site, Collier comments favorably on artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout’s review in Commentary of Alyn Shipton’s massive A New History of Jazz. Unfortunately Teachout’s review is available on line only to Commentary subscribers. Part of it is quoted later in this posting. Collier questioned TT’s observation that “it is by no means clear that post-modern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors.”
Here’s what Graham Collier wrote in response to Teachout’s proposition:

To expect what has happened in jazz in the last 50 years to be as coherent as what happened before is to miss the wood for the trees. There was a change in jazz in the period between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s which opened up the music in such a way that it will never be the same again, and this change made any “coherence” impossible. For me the pivotal point was Miles Davis’s 1959 album Kind of Blue, but other musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, were each trying to open up the music in their own way.
The result has been the possibility of musicians developing their own way, showing influences (such as that of Ellington, Mingus and Gil Evans in my music) but realising that there is now room for unique jazz voices to develop. To invert my previous analogy, there are now lots and lots of individual trees and no wood will ever emerge.

My guess is that close listeners familiar with the first decades of jazz hear incoherence in plenty of new music after, say, 1958, the year of Ornette Coleman’s Something Else. If we need a benchmark year, ’58 is as good as any for the apparent start of a shift away from strict observance of traditional harmony and, to an extent, from melody and rhythm. (In Coleman’s case, the shift was not nearly as radical as those who professed shock or outrage over it seemed to think it was.) You could make a case that the beginnings of a shift came in 1949, when Lennie Tristano recorded “Intuition” and “Digression.” Although those free pieces did not start a movement, they forecast it. Pick a year. How about 1946? Shorty Rogers told me that to kill time between shows at the Paramount Theater in New York, members of Woody Herman’s First Herd stood in a circle in the basement playing what fifteen years later came to be called free jazz. But who knew? Rogers said, “We’d never have dreamed of doing that in public.” If we’re dealing in forestry metaphors, the Herman Herd example is a case of a tree that fell, or grew, with no one hearing it.
Abandonment of approved guidelines governing coherence has been a fact of musical life throughout history. Otherwise, we’d be listening to clubs on hollow logs. Beethoven would have done things as Mozart did, Stravinsky as Brahms did.
I wonder if Graham Collier missed a larger point that Terry Teachout was making or suggesting in his Commentary piece, which is that when one is in the midst of any area of human activity, it is impossible to put it in historical perspective. It may be helpful to read Teachout’s line about coherence in its fuller context at the end of his long review. Here are the final few paragraphs.

In recent years, many jazz musicians have looked for the answers to such questions in a famous remark made by the pianist Bill Evans and quoted in A New History:
“Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz.”
Alyn Shipton clearly understands the implications of this remark, and the catholicity with which he describes pre-1970 jazz promises an equally clear understanding of later styles. “In what follows,” he writes in his introduction, “I have attempted to examine what was being described as jazz throughout its history, and I have taken a very broad view of how jazz should now be defined.” But, despite this broad perspective, he does not succeed in integrating postmodern jazz into his narrative.
His failure to do so reinforces my own belief that it is not yet possible to write a coherent historical survey that includes post-1970 stylistic developments. Not only are we too close in time to the jazz of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s to write about it with detachment, but it is by no means clear that postmodern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors.
Still, even if the many kinds of music that we continue to call “jazz” no longer have enough in common to be discussed collectively, most listeners and critics, myself included, stubbornly persist in viewing them as parts of a whole, unified (in Bill Evans’s words) not by their “whatness” but by their “howness.” Perhaps some jazz scholar as yet unborn will be able to explain to our children why we were right to do so.

In any case, whether or not his political characterizations of market forces and of what “passes as jazz today” are accurate, Collier lays out an unavoidable truth facing all creative artists who depart from accepted norms.

The only problem for these individuals – who exist in every part of the world – is getting heard. And finding an audience among the increasingly market-led neo-conservative, re-creative and tribute-led music which passes as jazz today.

Just in case you have lost track of the famous white plastic Grafton alto saxophone that Charlie Parker played for a time, here’s a reminder. The horn, actually cream-colored and made of acrylic, was among items sold at Christie’s in London when the Chan Parker Collection was auctioned in 1994. Chan, never legally Parker’s wife, was the mother of two of his children and inherited most of his possessions when he died in March, 1955.
As part of the pre-bidding activity, alto saxophonist Peter King played the horn, with the auction tag dangling from it. Rifftides reader Don Emanuel sent this link to a video of King demonstrating the alto with his regular rhythm section of the time, pianist Steve Melling, bassist Alec Dankworth and drummer Steve Keogh. The eight-minute clip has more than curiosity value. King can play.
The city of Kansas City, the birthplace of Charlie Parker, won the bidding at $144,500. The saxophone is in the collection of the American Jazz Museum in KC.

It was the kind of success that resists analysis, but it undoubtedly involved the contrast presented by (Dave) Brubeck and (Paul) Desmond, the pianist openly touching on the pensive, the boisterous, and the bombastic, the saxophonist a self-effacing master of a coolly detached, liquid lyricism.

–Stuart Broomer, pianist and critic, Amazon.com review

The word bombastic keeps coming up, as if it were some trap I keep falling into. Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic. Take it or leave it.

–Dave Brubeck, quoted in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Regarding the poll described in this item, a singer who requests anonymity for reasons of “career protection and seemliness” writes:

Your Jamie Cullum piece is spot-on, but it is worth noting that, unlike those many jazz singers who self-produce, Cullum is on a prominent European label (and a label with the savvy to rig polling). There are plenty of singers out there on labels who are just plain awful. I’m sure the need to attract the interest of label execs does help to filter out many of the awful singers who put out their own discs. But it certainly doesn’t ensure that there will be any baseline of quality.

The Brits, by the way, seem to have a particular taste for bad pseudo-jazz singing. Robbie Williams, anyone?

In any case, you’re absolutely right that we’re in for a fascinating stretch watching how the jazz world changes as it becomes ever easier for product to flood the rather miniscule market for the music. I too wonder what sort of new gatekeeping processes might develop, because they will have to. Otherwise the noise of all those recordings will drown out the ability to listen for anything good.

Carol Sloane has joined the ranks of bloggers, telling stories accumulated during her career as one of the best singers on earth. Her first entry has an introduction and a gripping story about the time she went to prison. I look forward to regularly reading SloaneView.I have added it to the links in Other Places in the right-hand column.

A new jazz radio station in England, theJazz, recently conducted a poll of its listeners to determine–as they put it–the “best ever jazz record.” This was the result, as reported on the BBC web site.

TOP TEN

1. Miles Davis – So What

2. Dave Brubeck – Take Five

3. Louis Armstrong – West End Blues

4. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

5. Miles Davis – All Blues

6. John Coltrane – My Favourite Things

7. Weather Report – Birdland

8. Jamie Cullum – Twentysomething

9. Duke Ellington – Take The ‘A’ Train

10. Miles Davis – Blue In Green

If you go to the web site of theJazz and examine its list of the top 500 records, you will discover that recordings by Jamie Cullum, a young British singer and pianist, placed 29, 32, 33, 46, 53 and 54. Do listeners to theJazz hear something that puts him in a league with Davis, Brubeck, Coltrane and Ellington? Or is there just the slightest chance–shocking to suggest it, I know–that there was a bit of ballot stuffing by Jamie Cullum interests?
This sort of thing accentuates the absudity of surveys and polls that rank the popularity of art. It may encourage some of us to reevalute the wisdom of taking part in, for instance, critics polls.

The traditional record industry is imploding. It is impossible to say what will emerge from the turbulence. Some analysts of the music business are predicting that the compact disc will quickly go the way of the LP, the cassette, the eight-track tape, the 45, the 78 and the cylinder. They say it’s going to be an iPod world, an MP3 world. How long will technology allow those new means of music delivery to survive? Are you ready for a digital implant in your brain?

In the meantime, CDs proliferate because they’re so easy, so cheap, to make. The expense and sheer complexity of gettting music from an instrument or a voice into a microphone and ultimately onto a record used to require the resources of a company. Digital technology, the internet and distribution by downloading make it possible for anyone who can raise a few thousand dollars to be a record label. One of the immediate by-products of the transition is that recording “artists” (ahem) are materializing at an incredible rate. Who knew that there were so many jazz singers? The maturing and development of singers once took place through the demanding process of experience, during which those with the goods survived and the wannabees, for the most part, didn’t. Now the wannabees bypass experience and put out CDs on their own labels. Some of those recordings are awful, most merely boring. That is why it was welcome to receive the recent release—in one fell swoop—of nine CDs by survivors of a more rigorous system. These albums from EMI were issued in the 1950s and 1960s on the Capitol, Pacific Jazz and Roulette labels. Some of the singers were more accomplished than others, but all are at or near their best in this series, and it may be instructive for some of the wannabees to study them. One clue to what they might listen for: in nearly every case, the performances are more about the song than the singer.

Sarah Vaughan, Sarah + 2 (Roulette). Vaughan recorded two indispensable albums with only bass and guitar, this one and the earlier After Hours, also for Roulette. Here, the bassist is Joe Comfort, the guitarist Barney Kessel, who may have been her ideal accompanist. In this minimal setting, Sarah powered down and avoided the excesses that sometimes marred her work when she was surrounded by massed strings, reeds and brass. Everything that made her a phenomenon of twentieth century art is in balance–musicianship, elegance, judgment, intonation, control, vocal quality and that astonishing range. If you need to know why an opera star like Renee Fleming worships Vaughan, consult this CD.

June Christy, The Intimate Miss Christy (Capitol). Christy’s strength was her story telling. Her famously unstable intonation occasionally wanders here, but it is perfect as she gets to the hearts of “The More I See You” and “Don’t Explain.” Her “Misty” is the best I’ve ever heard (yes, I know about Sarah Vaughan’s). Christy should have recorded with small groups more often. Her compatability with guitarist Al Viola is a large reason for the success of this venture.

Sue Raney, All By Myself (Capitol). There’s a hint of Christy in some of this early work by the sublime Raney, but her flawless intonation, time and phrasing are her own. The zest she brings to “Some of These Days” and the longing to “Maybe You’ll Be There,” define those songs. This was her second album for Capitol, made when she was twenty-three. It disappeared for decades. It’s good to have it back.

Chris Connor, At The Village Gate (Roulette). Because she succeeded Christy in Stan Kenton’s band, was also blonde and had a husky quality to her voice, Connor was at first presumed to be a Christy imitator. She never was. In this club date long after her Kenton years, Connor was a powerhouse, nailing every song, creating excitement that rarely surfaced in her better known albums. This is a revelation.

Joe Williams, A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry (Roulette). This was the first of Williams’s great ballad albums, the one that disclosed him as more than a magnificent blues singer. In a class with Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra as a balladeer, Williams finds the soul and meaning of a dozen songs. He and the incomparable arranger Jimmy Mundy include the seldom-heard verses of several of the pieces. Still with Count Basie when this was recorded, Williams was at the apex of his ability.

Irene Kral, The Band and I (Capitol). Nearly thirty years after her death, a substantial cadre of afficianados maintains that Kral was the best female jazz singer of them all. This is the record that made her a darling of musicians and sophisticated listeners. Never interested in scatting, Kral used taste, rhythmic assurance and intelligent interpretation to establish jazz authority. The band was Herb Pomeroy’s. This album was the only time they and Kral worked together. They created a classic.

Jon Hendricks, A Good Git-Together (Pacific Jazz). Hendricks does scat. He knows what chords are made of and takes musicianly advantage of that knowledge. Of the albums he recorded apart from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross during that group’s primacy, this is the most joyous. No doubt his elation had something to do with the company he kept in the studio. His sidemen included Wes, Buddy and Monk Montgomery; Nat and Cannonball Adderley and Pony Poindexter.

Dakota Staton, Dynamic! (Capitol). Staton could be dynamic, all right, earning that exclamation point in the title. She could also go into a cloying sex kitten mode, saccharine to the point of embarrassment. When she concentrated on serving the song, she was often splendid, as she is here on “They All Laughed,” “Cherokee” and “I’ll Remember April.” Among the supporting cast, Harry Edison’s trumpet is obvious, but who are the terrific bassist and the lightning-fast trombonist? The reissue producers might have consulted the original session sheets and listed the musicians for all the CDs in this series.

Julie London, Around Midnight (Capitol). London’s treatments of “Misty,” “‘Round Midnight” and “Don’t Smoke in Bed” are among her best performances. Now and then she glides in and out of tune on a held note, but on balance this may be her finest album. London’s strengths were a bewitching intimacy and her believable connection to lyrics. This is a ballad collection relieved by “You and the Night and the Music” and “But Not For Me” well arranged by Dick Reynolds at medium tempos. London does an effective cover of Christy’s “Something Cool,” despite the distraction of a vocal group behind her chanting “something cool, something cool, something cool.”