The other day, Ashley Foot, the ebullient young host of the internet’s Radio Allegro, invited me to be on his program. In the recorded interview, I told him, “There’s an incredible outpouring of jazz CDs these days. You’d never know jazz was dying.”
“It’s dying!” he said in alarm, “What are you talking about?”
Having failed to transmit irony, I explained that someone or other is always saying that jazz is dead or dying or not very well, but that the stream of albums seems to be swelling, not shrinking. Now that any musician who can scrape up $1500 or so can be a recording artist, can even be his own record company, it’s a question whether many of those CDs will ever be more than digital calling cards. Still, success stories like Maria Schneider’s declaration of business independence with her artistShare venture prove that it is possible for musicians to control their own destinies if they have bases upon which to build.
Hundreds if not thousands of jazz CDs appear each year from individuals with vanity labels, from startup independents, from established companies. Facing this flood, all that a reviewer can do is be selective. Over the next few postings, I’ll give you brief accounts of a few of the CDs that lately have caught my attention.
It could be nearly a full-time job just keeping up with the output of The Jazz Depot, the umbrella company that produces the High Note, Savant and Fedora labels. I have chosen a few recent CDs from this prolific outfit.
Houston Person with Bill Charlap: You Taught My Heart to Sing (High Note). As leader of his respected trio, Charlap is a Blue Note artist, but materializes as a sideman on other labels. That is good news for listeners, who get to hear the pianist in fresh contexts, and it is good news for Person. The veteran tenor saxophonist’s duets with Charlap are triumphs of quiet authority and lyricism. Most of the pieces are slow ballads, but even when the tempo is that of a brisk walk, as in “S’Wonderful,” the two are relaxed and assured in their swing. This is a pair of tonemeisters. Person’s sound has both softness and strength. Charlap’s touch–the pianist’s equivalent of tone–allows him a combination of delicacy and firmness in a league with Hank Jones, Jimmy Rowles and Tommy Flanagan. It is a joy when he combines it with his exqusite harmonic sensibility in the accompaniment to Person’s speech-inflected solo in “Don’t Forget The Blues.” Their “Sweet Lorraine” is a modern classic version of that infectious song.
Louis Hayes and the Cannonball Legacy Band: Maxiumum Firepower (Savant). Hayes was the drummer in one of Cannonball Adderley’s most potent quintets with his cornetist brother Nat. Here, he recruits five of the brightest younger players to summon up the irrepressible spirit of that band. Vincent Herring, long established as the keenest inheritor of Adderley’s style, is on alto sax. Jeremy Pelt is the trumpeter. Richie Goods is the bassist. Rick Germanson and Anthony Wonsey split piano duties. All of the pieces but Pelt’s tribute “The Two of Them” are from Addlerley’s repertoire, the hits (“This Here,” “Sack O’ Woe”) and the favorites of musicians (“Unit 7,” “Sweet Georgia Bright”). If the playing doesn’t quite attain the volubility and fire of the Adderleys, it is nonetheless excellent and comes as close as any living musicians are likely to achieve.
Larry Willis: The Big Push (High Note). Willis is a far less well known pianist than his talent warrants. Jackie McLean, Stan Getz, Kai Winding, Cannonball Adderley, Branford Marsalis and Roy Hargrove are among the leaders who knew his value. This CD with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Al Foster has the potential to be the big push he needs to gain a wider audience. Willis is modeish in Wayne Shorter’s title tune. He devises bracing chords for “Surrey With the Fringe on Top.” In “Poppa Nat, ” he finds new things to do with “I Got Rhythm” changes, and invests “Everything I Have is Yours” with rare poignancy, from its rarely heard verse to a filagreed ending shared with Foster’s cymbals.
Reviews of more CDs in the next Rifftides posting.

Gillespiana In The Berkshires

On vacation this week, in Connecticut to visit friends. Looking for musical diversion, I stumbled across the Tanglewood Jazz Festival at the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, MA.
Due to time constraints, I was able to attend only one concert – so I chose the Dizzy Gillespie All Star big band. For me, a great choice. Led by veteran trombonist Slide Hampton, the band was legitimately “all star”… a killer trumpet section: Roy Hargrove, Claudio Roditi, Lou Hunt (phenomenal chops, stratospheric high notes) and Frank Greene (ditto). Trombones: Steve Davis (several good solos), Jason Jackson, Jonathan Boltzock, Douglas Purviance (bass trb). Saxes: Gary Smulyan, Andres Boiarsky (new to me and very good), Mark Gross and Antonio Hart (altos) and Jimmy Heath (looking old and somewhat frail but playing well). Rhythm section: Cyrus Chestnut, piano; John Lee, bass; Dennis Mackrel, drums; and Duke Lee on congas.
Hargrove was heavily featured and worth it. He shone especially on Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” on fluegelhorn and on several other tunes. Roditi was lyrical and thoughtful, playing his rotary-valve horn.
Cyrus Chestnut was showcased on the Dennis Mackrel arrangement of Monk’s “I Mean You” and was alternately Monkish and funkish to the delight of the sold-out audience of 1200 in Meiji Ozawa Hall. Other highlights: Jimmy Heath’s tribute to Dizzy, “Without You, No Me”… “Con Alma”… “Manteca”… Quincy Jones’ “Jessica’s Day”.
Roberta Gambarini came on for a couple of tunes in each half of the concert. She’s good, especially effective in a dramatic reading of “Stardust”. Her singing of “Samba de Orfeu”, arranged by Slide Hampton, was an adventure in Portuguese and English, with changes in tempo and excellent vocal work. She scatted to advantage on “Blue-n-Boogie” which also included some Roy Hargrove scatting. He continues in the trumpeter/scat vocalist tradition of Louis Armstrong and Clark Terry. Electric bassist John Lee pleased the crowd with his work on “One Bass Hit”. Mackrel is a fine big band drummer and his arrangements are fresh and interesting.
Hampton is a congenial leader, mixing humor, enthusiasm and information to engage the audience. The obvious pleasure the band got from the music and their colleagues’ solos was infectious, further bringing the audience into the moment.
So – if you get a chance to hear/see the DG All Stars in your town, by all means do it. They’re still carrying the big band bebop banner. Long may it wave.
Your traveling Washington correspondent,
John Birchard

We continue to get comments on the news that pianist Steve Kuhn will record for Blue Note. This one is from drummer Steve Grover in Farmingdale, Maine.

I enjoy Rifftides and I was pleased to see that some attention is being directed toward Steve Kuhn. I think he is one of the most intelligent jazz pianists of our time (or any time). Steve occasionally comes through New England, and I caught him a couple of times. One trio performance with George Mraz and Al Foster stands out. The club was about half full, but the subtle, witty and quote-laden interplay between the three musicians was sublime. I hesitate to bring up the quoting, which is a gratuitous practice in most hands, but Steve unfolds his improvisations with such wit, melody and musicality that quotes are a seemless part of the web. His time is impeccable and he is always engaged with the tendencies of his musicians. The term ‘musical conversation’ is a common phrase, but rarely have I heard such probing music that clearly defined that expression.
Yet I heard him with Kenny Washington a few years later at The Knickerbocker one night and he was playing deep in the pocket, swinging hard. This kind of sympatico is natural to Mr. Kuhn, and it is never obvious, yet apparent. I love his deep-in-the-keys sound; it is a beautiful, singing sound, and it permeates everything he plays.
Steve Kuhn is a major figure and I hope he gets more than a one-off with Blue Note, but I’ll take that happily when it comes out.

With video clips proliferating on the internet, you never know what you’ll run across. Roaming around YouTube, I happened on one called Trumpet Summit ’04. The lead-in box showed a still frame of Jon Faddis. Something clicked. When I punched up the clip, sure enough, it was part of the Vienne, France, twentieth anniversary festival that I covered, not in 2004, but in 2000. YouTube’s accuracy of information is at the mercy of its contributors. The piece is “Honeysuckle Rose.” To hear and see it, click here. Below is my account of the entire concert, as it ran in a long report in the February, 2001, issue of Gene Lees JazzLetter.

The night’s theme was Louis Armstrong. The Trumpet Summit Band had the formidable rhythm section of Cedar Walton on piano, Doug Weiss on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums supporting trumpeters Terell Stafford, Randy Brecker, Lou Soloff, Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard and Jon Faddis. Backstage, as they milled around getting ready to go on, Brecker told me, “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” They figured it out on the first number, “Indiana”. The solos were brief, at the most a couple of choruses apiece, encouraging self-editing. Stafford began with a straightforward bebop solo. Brecker dug into the chords. Hargrove did a nice adaptation of Dizzy Gillespie and observed Clifford Brown’s rule of contrasting phrases. Soloff quoted Armstrong’s “West End Blues” introduction. Faddis and Stafford sidled up close on opposite sides and stared at him. Soloff ignored them. Blanchard played cleanly, high, and without the slurs and half-valve notes that so often dominate his improvising. Muted, Faddis combined traces of Gillespie and Sweets Edison and reduced the others to head shaking and laughter with his impossibly high and humorous playing. Walton played the first of his eight perfect solos in the set. Everyone avoided the temptation to quote “Donna Lee.”

Faddis and Stafford shared “Blueberry Hill”, Faddis muted and growling, Stafford using a plunger and making rich harmonic choices. On “Sunny Side of the Street,” Soloff showed the mature wisdom of using pauses as notes. Brecker went deep inside the changes and found material to make a beautiful new melody.

Hargrove’s tone, phrasing, sense of harmonic changes and control of time on “Sleepy Time Down South” combined in a solo that brought sustained applause from the audience and his colleagues. Later, he told me, “Man, that’s a hell of a way to learn a tune.” He said he had never before played it. Blanchard used his slurs and half-valve effects in Sleepy Time and worked them into a climax worthy of Roy Eldridge. Everyone played on Honeysuckle Rose. The big surprise was Stafford, with his aggressive and imaginative use of swing and bop elements. He has recorded with Tim Warfield, Stephen Scott, Bobby Watson, the Clayton Brothers, and others, but he was new to most of this audience and they let him know that they were impressed.

Soloff and Faddis played the “West End Blues” intro in unison, leading into a long, slow blues. Iraklì de Davrichewy materialized onstage for the first solo, unintimidated by this high powered company, and did well. So did they all, but Brecker is one of the few trumpeters alive who seems to have truly heard what Fats Navarro discovered about changes. His solo proved it. Faddis roamed around in the altissimosphere, then dropped down into the range of mere high Cs for some pure Louis. Walton incorporated “After Hours” without making it a corny trick.

The encore was “Get Happy,” played fast. Not until near its end, in a series of four-bar, two-bar and one-bar exchanges did the ad hoc gathering deteriorate into the messy jam session it might have been in lesser hands.

I hope that more videos from the 2000 Vienne festival turn up. It was a remarkable festival.

Last night I dropped into The Seasons to catch the last half of a concert by the Finisterra Trio, the hall’s artists in residence. They are violinist Kwan Bin Park, cellist Keven Krentz and pianist Tanya Stambuck. In previous posts, I have mentioned this Seattle piano trio’s finesse and enthusiasm. One of their other strong points is an eagerness to range through music in search of pieces outside of the usual repertoire. They played Edouard Lalo’s trio in a-minor. In his role as introducer and staff musicologist, Krentz described Lalo as a “B composer,” but in this piece–new to me and most of the audience–Lalo produced “A” material.
As Krentz explained, Lalo, a Frenchman of Spanish extraction, was a sort of precursor to the French impressionists, but he is often described as having the stolid characteristics of his late nineteenth century German contemporaries. Not in the a-minor trio. It has the passion of Lalo’s Iberian forebears, highlighted by a highly charged second movement laced with fun, a slow third movement to make your heart ache and a finale to make it race. Park, Krentz and Stambuck poured energy and ardor into the piece. In return, they got applause after each movement, and a standing ovation at the end. They deserved warm appreciation, but the obligatory Standing O is becoming as common among classical audiences as is automatic applause for jazz solos, no matter how dumb or boring. If you’d like to review the Rifftides applause discussion of a few months ago, you can go here and trace it back through the links.
On their website, Finesterra has MP3 samples of the Lalo a-minor. Unfortunately, they have yet to record the entire work. Until they do, there are choices. Still high on the aftereffects of the Finesterra performance, this morning I sampled other options. I found the Gryphon Trio‘s approach a bit soggy. The Parnassus Trio edged out the Salomon for second place to what I heard last night. They both have fine versions, but they don’t achieve quite the vigor of the Finisterrans. It’s good to see chamber music alive and well in the hands, minds and hearts of a hip young group like the Finisterra Trio.

George Ziskind writes from New York:

Good to have Kuhn in the air of late. And it reminds me of this:
Steve has always been an adventurous player. Yet nothing I had previously heard him do prepared me for the time, around seven or eight years ago, when I was listening to his Dedication CD (Reservoir). I was in the first chorus of Like Someone in Love, specifically at bar 7, and no matter how many times I replayed that bar I got the same result: damn if the tempo wasn’t slowing down there, almost imperceptibly yet definitely noticeably! I chalked it up to being some kind of other-worldly recording anomaly.
A few weeks thereafter I went to catch a set by Steve at the Knickerbocker – a terribly noisy club that uses good piano players. And by gosh, what did he play? “Like Someone In Love,” of course. And what happened at bar 7? The tempo slowed down again, a tiny smidge, just as on the CD.
After the set I buttonholed him, asking if there was some mystical meaning to this, or perhaps at least a personal explanation? Why did he slow down the tempo there?
He replied, “Why not?”

Many Rifftides readers are themselves bloggers. Richard Carlson, the proprietor of JazzoLOG, called my attention to a fine piece about his memories of Maynard Ferguson. Here’s a taste of it.

Maynard stood out in front of that band like a cheerleader/drill sergeant somehow combined. He was constantly on the move to the rhythm. He must have been in a marching band around his home of Montreal when he was a kid, because he liked to tuck his horn under his arm and just march up there while the ensemble played away. A huge smile on his face and eyes closed, marching, marching, a bit hunched over…until time for that closing climax, when he’d face us and let loose with such a screaming, molten sound, our jaws would drop and stay that way. He loved to talk to us during breaks and gave us all the time we wanted.

One night, the young Carlson and his friends asked Ferguson how he reached so high on the trumpet. To read the answer and the rest of a lovely memoir, go here.

What do the Angel Orensanz Center on New York’s Lower East Side; The Old Church in Portland, Oregon; the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven and The Seasons in Yakima, Washington, have in common? They are former places of worship born again as performance halls. My story in the Leisure & Arts pages of today’s Wall Street Journal tells about a few of the dozens of such places.

The acoustical properties and central locations of old sanctuaries often make them ideal concert halls, but converted churches and synagogues find other performance uses as well. Across the Cascade Mountains from Yakima, Seattle’s Town Hall, another decommissioned Christian Science church, functions as a cultural kaleidoscope.
“When you take on the responsibility to preserve and extend the life of an old building,” says executive director Wier Harman, “it’s a process of discovering what kinds of works find their best expression here.”

Sorry, no link. If you’re not a print or online WSJ subscriber, you can probably find a copy at your nearest news stand, supermarket or airport.

Regarding the Steve Kuhn CD that will be issued next year on the Blue Note label, the Rifftides reader who calls himself drjazzphd writes:

This is only supposed to be a one-off deal for the live date but I’m very pleased to see Blue Note taking an interest in such a fine pianist, who has lurked in the shadows for many years now. Also Blue Note will be releasing an album recorded two weeks ago at Iridium of the Charles Tolliver Big Band on the heels of the article in DownBeat a couple months back. This is also positive because it shows that this major label is putting its money where its mouth is to support great art. Just wish they did it more often. Also on the horizon for 2007 along with the Kuhn and the Tolliver, there will be a new record by Jackie Terrason, which I believe will be a solo record.

Not that I would ever doubt a man with a Ph.D., but I checked his information (those old reporter genes keep kicking in) with Cem Kurosman at Blue Note, who replied:

All true. And you can also tell your “source” that we will be recording a supergroup under the leadership of Kenny Werner next week (Werner, Dave Douglas, Chris Potter, Scott Colley, Brian Blade), another release that will come out in the Winter/Spring 2007!

The exclamation point is Kurosman’s.
That’s that. This blog will not become a middleman for record company previews, but it is good to see solid, uncompromising musicians getting a break.

It was my intention to spend most of yesterday auditioning a few of the CDs that lately have been pouring in here like Lake Pontchartrain emptying into New Orleans. But first, I thought, how about a nice morning mountain bike ride in Cowiche Canyon.
At the bottom of that canyon northwest of Yakima is a three-mile trail on the bed of a railroad that was abandoned in 1984. It’s a great place to see wildflowers and an assortment of birds and small animals, mostly cottontails and an occasional reptile. For demented mountain bikers, the attraction is less the gravelly path along Cowiche Creek than the narrow dirt trail that snakes along the south canyon wall. From the rim of the high desert uplands to the canyon floor, the elevation drop (term used advisedly) is 450 feet. The trail is narrow, uneven, studded with large rocks and full of hairpin switchbacks, many of which edge out into space. If you are going to test your balance, strength and reflexes by riding this rollercoaster, it is a splendid idea to be sure that your machine’s brakes are functioning properly.
Somewhere in the dim (term used advisedly) recesses of my mind, I knew that the front brake on the bicycle I acquired for next to nothing at a yard sale was a bit weak. The fact came back to me powerfully as I began making my way down the first segment of the descent. In this photograph, the trail on the canyon floor is that thin ribbon way down there.
In the lower left, you see a portion of the trail I was on. The picture does not do justice to its pitch. Suddenly, gravity was moving me along much faster than one would think warranted by the negligible combined weight of me and the cycle. I jammed the front brake lever nearly into the handlebar, but it barely slowed me. The slightest pressure on the rear brake lever locked the rear tire into a skid that threatened to fishtail the bike and its occupant over the edge and dash us down among the sagebursh and fragments of basalt on the steep slope.
Experimenting gingerly with various combinations of pressures on the rear brake and what was left of the front, I was able to keep my speed down enough not to zoom off the lip of a 180-degree switchback. Somehow, I managed to stop the cycle and walk around the turnback, then remount and inch along to the next hazard. In that way, slowly, turn after turn, I made it to the bottom. When I got on level ground, I found myself looking around to see whether anyone had been watching. Absurdly, I was proud to have survived my stupidity and hoping for witnesses, but I was the canyon’s sole occupant. My only injury was a deer-fly bite.
Emerging from the bottom of the canyon onto a paved road and back into civilization, I rode immediately a mile or so to Revolution Cycles, where the always agreeable Mike readjusted the front brake. He asked if I’d had a good ride and where I had gone. Yes, I said, a good ride. Cowiche Canyon.
“We’re lucky to have that, aren’t we?” he said.
“Well,” I told him, “I feel lucky.”
Maybe I’ll get to those recordings today.
(Photo, Eric Noel, B.L.M.)