Jim Harrod writes concerning the Rifftides item about Pinky Winters:

I enjoyed your recent celebration of Pinky’s Mandel CD. If readers inquire where they might acquire this gem for less than $40, I would heartily recommend Early Records in Tokyo. The owner, Hiroshi Tanno, sells it for ¥2,800 and charged me ¥450 for delivery. The total was ¥3,250, translated to $28.33 and was paid via PayPal, making the transaction seamless and fast. Hiroshi can be contacted at hiroshi@earlyrecords.com

The veteran vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake writes in response to yesterday’s John Williams item:

I bought the John Williams 10′ inch LP while in high school. (Stephen F. Austin in Houston). I still have it today and it’s in excellent condition. I play it every once in awhile. I also bought during the same period the big Stan Getz at The Shrine Auditorium double recording with John Williams and Bob Brookmeyer. Over the ensuing years someone lifted that one from me but I got it back years later on CD.

Stan Getz at The Shrine, originally a fancy two-LP boxed set, is reissued as a single CD. “Feather Merchant,” the piece that opened the live concert recording on LP, closes the CD. It begins with four blues choruses by Williams in which he manages to be elliptical and allusive while at the same time rumbling boisterously in the basement of the piano. It’s a balancing act that I never tire of hearing.

During long stretches of 1953 and ‘54, John Williams was the pianist in Stan Getz’s quintet and quartet. Wiliams is often described in biographies as a disciple of Bud Powell who was also influenced by Horace Silver. That is true. It is also true that oxygen influences flame, a fact that tells us nothing about the differences among flames. In the population of pianists influenced by Powell and Silver, Williams was identifiable by a keyboard touch that produced a spikey, percussive, rollicking forward motion, an infectious swing. Almost in contradiction, at the same time he somehow achieved a smoothness of phrasing that invested his improvised lines with the logic of inevitability. He managed to make his listeners anticipate what was coming in a solo and yet surprise them when he got there.
Williams’ first album under his own name was John Williams, a ten-inch LP on the Emarcy label, recorded in 1954. His trio had Bill Anthony on bass and the unique Detroit drummer Frank Isola, fellow members of the Stan Getz group. Williams jokes today that he often wonders who got the third copy of the album after he and his mother each bought one. It may not have been a big seller, but it quickly became a favorite of musicians and, after Emarcy pulled it, of collectors. In the 1990s, a broker of rare LPs who sold to Japanese LP zealots told me that a mint copy of John Williams was going in Japan for upwards of $300. I blush to confess that I sold him my beat-up copy for considerably less than that, making him wait while I first copied it to tape. As we listened, I hummed along to Wiliams’ solos, so embedded in my brain had they become over four decades of nearly wearing out the album.
It was a puzzle, given the LP’s iconic status, why Emarcy did not reissue it on CD, and why Verve did not bring it out after the company acquired the Emarcy catalog. A good guess is that the decision was made by accountants. Time has cured that ill. Copyright laws in Spain declare that after fifty years, recorded material is fair game (I’m not sure that’s the exact wording of the law). So, the resourceful Fresh Sound label has put on one CD John Williams and the pianist’s second Emarcy album, a twelve-inch LP called John Williams Trio, recorded in 1955. This belated event probably doesn’t do much for the inflated price of the original LPs, but it is a boon to the substantial number of Williams fans who have been clamoring for a reissue. It may also gain him new fans.
The second album, done in three sessions with shifting personnel among bassists and drummers, doesn’t have quite the concentrated charm of the ten-inch 1954 session. That is in part, I suspect, because Frank Isola is on only one track. Nonetheless, it has wonderful moments. Taken together, the twenty tracks capture John Williams when his playing was full of freshness, vigor and peppery lyricism. By all accounts, including the evidence of an appearance with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, it still is. He has never stopped playing, but he took a few decades off to become a banker and, for twenty years, a city commissioner of Hollywood, Florida. In conversation, Williams tends to deprecate his playing in the 1950s as inadequate, an evaluation that flies in the face of the wisdom of his employers—StanGetz, Bob Brookmeyer, Cannonball Adderley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims among them—and of listeners who have been stimulated by his work for half a century.
I should point out, although by now it may be obvious, that this John Williams is not the Star Wars John Williams.

Pianist and singer Patti Wicks saw yesterday’s post about Antonio Carlos Jobim and sent a link to video of Jobim, widely known as “Tom,” and his friend the incomparable Elis Regina singing his “Aguas de Marco.” I’ve played it a half-dozen times and can’t get enough of seeing the joy they found in performing together. Watch her hands.

Eleven years after his death, the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim is as universal as that of Gershwin, Berlin and Porter. Yet, until the issue of the new boxed set The Prime of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the three albums in it were out of general circulation except for a brief reappearance shortly after he died. They are The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim; Love, Strings and Jobim; and, most important, A Certain Mr. Jobim, all from the 1960s, all originally on the Warner Bros. label but reissued on dbk.
The Wonderful World has good arrangements by Nelson Riddle, and in the instrumental “Surfboard” a great one. Jobim’s voice is more relaxed than in A Certain Mr. Jobim, but his collaboration with the arranger Claus Ogerman in A Certan Mr. Jobim strikes the Brazilian spark that Riddle achieves less successfully. The empathy between Jobim and Ogerman, so dramatically displayed in Jobim’s first American album a few years earlier, is typified in a haunting performance of “Bonita” that puts the Riddle “Bonita” in the shade. But in each case, we hear the composer of “Desafinado,” “She’s a Carioca,” “Dindi,” “Outra Vez” and “Agua de Beber” singing, playing piano and guitar and giving his songs definitive interpretations.
Love, Strings and Jobim was, and is, packaged to look like a Jobim album. It is, rather, a collection of songs and performances by other Brazilian musicains presented by Jobim, with only two of his songs included and not peformed by him. It offers glimpses of Eumir Deodato, Oscar Castro-Neves and Baden Powell, among others, all part of the infusion of bossa nova into the mainstream of music and worth having for that reason. Terri Hinte’s liner notes, full of knowledge, keep such matters in perspective and provide insights into Jobim and his music. Her understanding of Brazil and Brazilians is a bonus in a package that will fill empty spaces in many otherwise complete Jobim collections. The set does not provide a comprehensive look at Jobim, but it is a reasonable point of entry to his world.

Julius La Rosa, naturally, has a considerable interest in lyrics and lyricists. He called my attention to these little verses by Yip Harburg, one of the greatest American lyricists (“Over the Rainbow,” “April in Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” among 600 or so others).

No matter how much I probe and prod
I cannot quite believe in God,
But, oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.
O innocent victims of Cupid,
Remember this terse little verse:
To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse.
©Rhymes for the Irreverent, E.Y. Harburg

A few Rifftiders—if that’s the term (and it might as well be)—have asked about our mid-week visit to tulip country in the Skagit Valley of western Washington State. Briefly, then:
The first day was warm and sunny. We walked around the charming waterfront town of La Conner, population 750, where we stayed two nights at the Wild Iris Inn. The second day was chilly, damp, exhilarating. We went to the fields of Tulip Town, then RoozenGaarde, and toured both extensively, glad that we had our muck boots. We drove around the valley and saw hundreds of acres of tulips and daffodils at their peak, also admiring the splendid old houses on high foundations, ready for the hundred-year flood. New Orleans might benefit from sending a delegation to study their construction. We ate and drank well at good La Conner restaurants. It was a fine and welcome short vacation.

While I was away in the tulip fields, On An Overgrown Path posted a piece on the late Michel Petrucciani. It includes a link to a thirty-eight-minute video about the pianist. In it, Petrucciani talks about his aversion to applause, his fear of death, his love of the piano. It’s an important film. Visit On An Overgrown Path, then come back, please.

The most recent concert at The Seasons was by a Russian group I went to hear out of curiosity. I knew that the members of Trio Voronezh were classically trained at the conservatory in Voronezh, a city near the Don river 250 miles south of Moscow. I knew that they played instruments I had never heard; the domra, the bajan and the double-bass balalaika. But what drew me in was their repertoire, which included J.S. Bach, Shostakovich, Mozart, Astor Piazolla, Gershwin, Khachaturian, an assortment of other Russian composers, Leroy Anderson and Consuelo Velasquez (“Besame Mucho”).
The domra played by Vladimir Volochin is a sort of lute dating from the 1400s, a forerunner of the balalaika. Its heritage is Mongolian. Like the balalaika, it is a three-stringed instrument played with a pick, but it is round, not triangular. Sergei Telshev’s bajan is an accordian with chromatic buttons rather than a keyboard. In most parts of the world, it is considered, even disparaged as, a novelty or folk instrument. Russians take the bajan seriously and study it in institutes of higher music education. Valerie Petrukhin’s instrument is a large version of the traditional balalakia, tuned in E, A and D in the general tonal range of the double bass violin. It stands on a leg attached to the low corner of the triangle. Petrukhin plays it standing, slightly hunched. For the most part, he strums the strings to keep time and provide chords, but once in a while he uses pizzicato in the way a jazz musician plays the bass. You may see the instruments and hear samples of the trio’s work if you go to their website.
Trio Voronezh’s virtuosity was astonishing. They played everything from memory, including the complex “Burlesque” allegro con brio from the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 and a wild medley of Gershwin songs that incorporated devilish variations on “I Got Rhythm.” Their “Air On The G-String” from BWV 1068 was a passionate performance of that ravishing Bach melody. They captured the Argentine tango mystery of three of Astor Piazolla’s pieces, including his famous “Oblivion.” These are not improvising musicians, but they played with verve so infectious that they created an aura of sponaneity. They charmed the audience with their demeanor, Volochin with his mime’s expressions, all with their close attention to one another and their double bows following each piece. They played two encores and got three standing ovations, heartfelt ones, not the obligatory kind. I was standing and applauding with the rest of the audience.
Afterward, chatting with Volokhin, I jokingly asked why they included no Charlie Parker pieces in their concerts. At first he looked puzzled, then he played a few bars of air saxophone and grinned. “We don’t know any,” he said.
Later, I dubbed the master takes of “Yardbird Suite” and “Donna Lee,” packaged the CDR with lead sheets and sent them off to Trio Voronezh headquarters. Whether they will tackle Bird, I have no idea, but if they do, I want to be there for the premier performance. I’ll let you know if it happens. In the meantime, if they show up in your neighborhood, don’t miss them.

The new Doug’s Picks in the right column include CDs by Roland Kirk and Herb Geller. Kirk’s is a live recording made in Hamburg in 1972. Geller lived in Hamburg then, as he does now. In a coincidence that I don’t possess enough imagination to have made up, Geller attended Kirk’s concert. He read the Rifftides reviews and sent the following message. I have added links to explain some of his references.

Dear Doug,
I remember Roland Kirk´s concert at the NDR concert hall (the funkhaus). It was the only time I heard him live. It seemed to me at the time he did about 20 minutes of blowing in one breath! Then he started playing two and even three instruments at a time. He even played a few notes of flute and clarinet spontaneously and I almost fell out of my chair. This was of course like a circus act, but he pulled it off. The depth of his music for me was not that enthralling but the physical act itself was incredible.
I didn´t know the other musicians, but after they were announced, the drummer´s name rang a bell, especially since he was Richie Goldberg and black. After they finished, I went to him and told him my name. He jumped up and hugged me, saying he used to be married to Vi Redd, and Lorraine and I had visited them at their home in L.A. I went to Dorsey High School along with Vi and we were good friends there. He introduced me to Roland who told me he admired my playing especially on “Sleighride” and commented that the song had a difficult bridge, (which was why I enjoyed playing it).
Herbie G.

Lorraine was Geller’s first wife, a brilliant pianist who is with him on “Sleighride” on the Herb Geller Plays album. She died in 1958, an event that sent him into depression and on an extended trip to escape it. He ended up in Europe, where he has lived, for the most part, ever since.
Amazon offers Herb Geller Plays at an inflated import CD price. The album has not been reissued on CD in the United States, but Verve, which controls the EmArcy catalogue, offers it here as an iTunes download. Those who comprehend that technology may want to investigate.