Jazz record sales continue to limp along at the infamous three percent (+-) of the market, but the output of jazz CDs seems to accelerate day by day. That is a contradiction worthy of serious study. I hope that some brave scholar or resourceful reporter takes it on. Part of the explanation, of course, is the impact of technology. In the days of the LP, the costly business of making records was dominated by big companies. Each major label and independent company released, at most, a few jazz albums a month. For the critic or reviewer, keeping up with the releases was demanding but manageable.
Digital advances have made possible cheap CD production. Every musician can be his own record company, and CDs come out by the hundreds every quarter. Musicians use CDs the way actors use 8X10 glossies and lawyers use business cards, to get attention and, they hope, work. People who write about music or broadcast it receive copies of those CDs, more albums than they can possibly audition. I have discussed this dilemma with others who review music. The conscientious ones feel equally frustrated and don’t know what to do about the deluge of CDs other than to let them pile up and hope to identify those that they should hear.
To the lay music fan, that may seem an embarassment of riches, but the experienced professional listener knows that a huge percentage of the accumulated discs aren’t worth a second hearing. The problem is finding the time for a first hearing. Listening is a linear activity. Only so many seventy-minute albums will fit into the day. So, one tries to do justice to the outpouring of efforts by musicians who deserve to be heard, and hopes that he won’t overlook the next Charlie Parker, Bill Evans or John Coltrane.
This week’s Rifftides postings will catch up with a scant few of the scores of albums that have appeared in the past few weeks and some that have been around longer. We begin with one of each.
Bill Frisell, Ron Carter, Paul Motian (Nonesuch). Guitarist Frisell’s world is so wide that his fans in some of its precincts will inevitably be disappointed that he plays here with economy and reserve. There is no looping (well, not much), no wah-wah, no feedback, no outrageous humor (only subtle humor), no hoedowns, no skronk. This is Frisell with bassist Carter and drummer Motian–masterly peers– improvising on themes as varied as Carter’s “Eighty-One” from the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet book, “You Are My Sunshine,” Thelonious Monk’s rarely played “Raise Four” and Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” There’s a straight-ahead jazz performance in “On The Street Where You Live,” with a tag ending in which Sonny Stitt would have felt at home, and another with great blues playing by all hands in Monk’s “Misterioso.” This is Frisell more or less back where he started, as a jazz musician, playing music for listening.
Mal Waldron, Mal/4 (New Jazz OJC). Waldron is not a household name these days. Nor was he in 1958 when he recorded this trio album with bassist Addison Farmer and drummer Kenny Dennis. Nonetheless, his compositions and his piano work with Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and his own trio earned him a substantial following and the respect of the jazz community. Waldron died in 2002 at the age of 76.
Initially inspired by Thelonious Monk, Waldron was also a deep student of Bud Powell. His Powell component is obvious in a spirited version of “Get Happy,” but Waldron’s unique use of his left hand sets him apart from other Powell disciples. The highlight of this CD is a joyous eleven-and-a-half-minute “Too Close For Comfort,” which he injects with Monk spirit and all but transforms into a blues. The album does not include Waldron’s most famous composition, “Soul Eyes,” but he plays “J.M.’s Dream Doll,” a musicians’ favorite among his songs. He treats “Like Someone in Love” not as the rapid exercise into which it has evolved in jazz circles, but as the deliberate, reflective ballad Burke and Van Heusen intended it to be. This CD is not a recent reissue, just one I thought you should know about.

The post-it note stuck to the jewel box of the young tenor saxophonist’s CD read, “Here’s a guy you should hear.” There must be a young tenor saxophonist factory somewhere, turning them out at an astonishing rate; cloning them. Otherwise, why would there be so many of them, sounding alike, replicating John Coltrane and Michael Brecker? I was a little tired of the clones, tired of cutting edge clichés. But the note was from Marc Edelman, the proprietor of Sharp Nine Records. He’s never steered me wrong, so I listened to Grant Stewart.
The first track was the CD’s title tune, “In The Still of the Night,” at a metronome setting–somewhere just short of 400–that would have raised Cole Porter’s eyebrows, and maybe his hair. At that intimidating tempo, the young tenor saxophonist was at ease and making sense, a mid-fifties Sonny Rollins kind of sense. There wasn’t a patented Coltrane or Brecker lick to be heard. Stewart was not merely holding his own with the seasoned rhythm section of pianist Tardo Hammer, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Joe Farnsworth; he was in charge of it. It was clear that he had absorbed plenty from the period that many listeners consider Rollins’ greatest, but he wasn’t a Rollins clone. Nor was he a Johnny Griffin or Stanley Turrentine clone, although he must have paid attention to them as he developed. He had a personal tone, fresh ideas, his own brand of wry humor and the ability to engage and keep my attention. About halfway through the CD, during Stewart’s loping solo on “Autumn in New York,” something clicked. I went to the shelves and, sure enough, I had heard him before, on a couple of Ryan Kisor albums, one recorded as recently as 2005. Stewart didn’t jump out at me then. He has jumped out at me now, and I’m happy to pass along Edelman’s suggestion: Here’s a guy you should hear.
As this week rolls along, the Rifftides staff will be posting brief observations on other CDs, some recent, some not.

The Louis Armstrong recordings from 1928 that get the most attention are “West End Blues,” “Muggles,” “Weather Bird,” “Squeeze Me” and “Tight Like This,” but there is a gem of an Armstrong solo, and another by Earl Hines, on the piece called “Knee Drops,” which is less often played or discussed. Click here to hear the piece in its entirety, not in the greatest possible fidelity, but perfectly listenable. In better sound, it is also on this CD, part of Columbia’s invaluable Armstrong series. Fred Robinson is the trombone soloist, Jimmy Strong the tenor saxophonist. Zutty Singleton, restricted by the engineering limitations of the day to cowbells and cymbals, nonetheless manages a charming, if strange, “drum” solo.

St. Patrick’s Day never arrives without reminding me of a record that did not get made. In the 1960s Paul Desmond and guitarist Jim Hall, frequent collaborators in those days, came up with an idea for an album of Irish music. In their planning session, they decided on some of the tunes they would record, “The Tralee Song,” “Lovely Hoolihan” and “Fitzhugh or No One” among them. That, unfortunately, is as far as the project went.
Happy St. Patrick’s day.

I have been roundly corrected by alert Rifftides readers who point out that the German broadcasting entity NDR has always been in Hamburg. For their interesting comments, additional information and a bit of speculation about the Phil Woods video discussed in the previous posting, go here. Thanks to all for their help.

Thanks to Rifftides reader Tyler Newcomb for sending a link to this Phil Woods video from 1968. YouTube gives almost no information about it. I gather from the ID bug in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that this was made in the studios of Norddeutscher Rundfunk in what was then East Germany. If so, given the cold war chill at the time, there must be a story about what the American musicians were doing there. The rotary valve flugelhorn player is Jimmy Owens. The trombonist appears to be Slide Hampton. The non-playing alto saxophonist sitting next to Woods is Lee Konitz, who now and then gives a knowing half smile. I have no idea who the other musicians are. And how about that song title, “And When Were Young?” That can’t be right.
YouTube‘s fact-checking process is nonexistent. It’s wonderful to have the music YouTube brings us, but If the video donor, in this case Selmer 54, doesn’t provide the information or gets it wrong, tough nuggets. If you can identify the mystery players or disclose the actual title, please send a comment (see the end of the posting) or an e-mail message (see the right-hand column).

Your more or less faithful correspondent is working pretty much full tilt on an essay to accompany the reissue of an important Red Garland album. In the course of researching the piece, I ran across an article I wrote about the pianist for Texas Monthly in 1977. It included Garland’s story about his first job with a name band. Not long out of the Army, in 1946 he was back in his hometown, Dallas, and sat in with the great trumpeter and singer Hot Lips Page. Page’s band was short a pianist, but Garland didn’t realize that he had just played an audition. He went home and went to bed.

About five the morning here comes a knock at the door–boom, boom, boom, boom–and my mother says, “What have you done, Little William, must be the police, you must have done something wrong.” We opened the door and there were Hot Lips Page and Buster Smith. Lips said, “You the guy who sat in with me tonight? Well, I need you, man. Come on, throw somethin’ in a bag and let’s go.” That was it. That was the beginning of life on the road.

The best-known episode of that life was Garland’s central role in the career of Miles Davis. The Texas Monthly piece about Garland is in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Pianist Emil Viklický and his trio recently did a tour of the Czech Republic with the American trumpeter Marcus Printup. It began at the Prague Castle and took in other cities including Olomouc. Viklický reports that a CD will be released of music from the castle concert. In Olomouc, a fan captured video of Viklický, Printup, bassist Petr Dvorsky and drummer Laco Tropp in a modern old-timey b-flat blues. The Rifftides staff thought that you would enjoy it. The camera work is amateurish. The music is decidedly not. To see and hear the clip, click here.

We’re in the most stupid business in the world.
-Artie Shaw, BBC interview
Are big bands coming back? Sure, every football
season.
-Woody Herman

Clifford Jordan, one of the great (term used advisedly) tenor saxophonists of the second half of the twentieth century, in 1974 made a magnificent album called Glass Bead Games. Billy Higgins was the drummer on all twelve tracks. Cedar Walton and Stanley Cowell shared piano duties. Sam Jones and Bill Lee were the bassists in the two editions of Jordan’s quartet represented on the album. Sonny Rollins, who rarely provides blurbs, called Glass Bead Games “Clifford Jordan at his best…with a great band!”
The album consisted entirely of Jordan compositions, a practice often adopted for the wrong reasons. Jordan followed it for the right ones; he was an accomplished and original composer, and he was inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. His music captures something of the mystery and strange energy of that story. The playing by all hands–but particularly by Jordan–is exceptional. Issued as a double LP on the Strata East label, the album finds Jordan maintaining his commitment to mainstream values while edging into the freedom of new music pioneered by colleagues like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He achieved a balance that might have served as an example for some of the space cadets who took the new music so far out that it became inaccessible to most listeners.
Glass Bead Games has not been generally available in its entirety for years. I have heard of copies of the LP set going at auction for as much as $100.00. From time to time, CDs of the album have been available from Japan at high prices. Now that she has acquired the rights to it, Jordan’s widow Sandra (he died in 1993) has made Glass Bead Games available at a reasonable price, apparently only from this source. Its reappearance is an important reissue event. I did an A/B comparison of the original LPs to the CD and was relieved to find that the sound quality has not been digitally distorted.