For ten years or so, David Sills has been emerging as a tenor saxophonist with a knack for fashioning calm, cool improvised lines laced with melodic and harmonic interest. His tonal quality leads reviewers to make comparisons with Stan Getz and Lester Young. Based on his harmonic resourcefulness, unruffled execution and slightly dry sound, it would be just as easy to find similarities to Hank Mobley and Warne Marsh. But comparisons are weak vessels. Sills is no imitator.
In his new CD, Down The Line, he begins his solo on “It’s All You” by toying with a series of intervals, seeming as casual as a man whiling away the time bouncing a ball. As he enters the sixteenth bar of his first solo chorus (the piece is based on “It’s You or No One”), he brings out material from the deeper harmonic structure of the tune and builds toward the mid-point of his solo. In the second chorus, Sills continues to increase the complexity of his melodic line and the intensity of his rhythm, but not his volume. As he approaches the final sixteen bars of the solo, his line is at its most variegated. Then he eases off with a succession of phrases like scales, recalling his opening intervals. He plays a section of mostly sixteenth notes, and finishes with a short speech-like declaration. In sixty-two seconds, Sills has told a story that has a definable beginning, middle and end. Economy of expression is not something of which post-Coltrane soloists are often accused. Here’s one who knows how to conceive a short statement, make it count, and get out.
In the same piece, Sills and alto saxophonist Gary Foster have a chorus of unaccompanied counterpoint in the style of Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz. Foster’s own solo finds him at his most Konitz-like, but on the album’s title tune—an “I Got Rhythm” variant—Foster is his identifiable self, and he has a quietly glittering solo on “Eastern View.” He and Sills blend so effectively on the out-chorus of “Slow Joe” that it was difficult on the first hearing to know whether it was one horn or two.
Alan Broadbent is the pianist. One of the great accompanists in jazz today, he also one of its most breathtaking soloists, as his work here on “Slow Joe” and “Down the Line” demonstrates. Broadbent’s introduction to Sills’ achingly beautiful peformance of “Never Let Me Go” and his solo on the piece are highlights of the CD. In common with Sills, guitarist Larry Koonse does not wear his virtuosity on his sleeve, but he doesn’t need to; his musicianship and the richness of his ideas are obvious. Broadbent’s longtime sidekick Putter Smith is the bassist, Tim Pleasant the sensitive drummer.
Nice album.

Larry Kart writes from Chicago about the David “Fathead” Newman review in the next exhibit:

A wise, lovely, loving piece of writing. A “customized time value” — yes. I had a similar thought the other day listening to Lou Donaldson on the reissue of his Blue Note album The Natural Soul. The way he holds a note as though he were holding/molding it with his hands.

One minute and twenty-six seconds into a blues called “Bu Bop Bass” on his new CD, Cityscape, the tenor saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman begins his solo with a phrase that consists of two quarter-note Fs, a quarter-note A and a half-note A—an interval of a major third in the key of F concert. How simple; except that it is not simple. It is complex, because Newman gives each note a customized time value that no annotator could capture on paper. They are Fathead Newman quarter notes and a half note. In addition, he gives the half note a slight downward turn, not so far that it becomes A-flat, just far enough that it’s a David Newman moan, a characteristic of his expression. Furthermore, he plays the phrase, as he does all of his music, with a tone that manages to be full and airy at the same time, not quite like anyone else’s tone. Newman has invested a one-bar phrase with his personality, so that anyone familiar with his work will know in that instant who is playing.
This sort of thing is what experienced musicians, fans and critics have in mind when they say that there was a time when they could recognize a soloist after a few notes. Except in the nostaligic minds of older listeners, that time is not gone, although it must be conceded that there are plenty of young soundalike players on every instrument. Is that a new phenomenon? Aside from specialists, could anyone really tell apart all of those disciples of Coleman Hawkins in the late 1930s and early forties, the herd of alto saxophonists in the 1950s who wanted to be Charlie Parker, the 1960s trumpeters who aspired to be clones of Freddie Hubbard? Imitators are eventually lost in the crowd. Individualists stand out.
On Cityscape, Newman places himself in the context of a seven-piece band similar to the six-piece Ray Charles outfit in which he became well known in the 1950s. He hasn’t recorded in that setting in a few years, and it’s good to hear again. The sound and feeling are reminiscent of the Charles days, but Newman and pianist-arranger David Leonhardt have collaborated to make the harmonic atmosphere fresh. Howard Johnson fills the crucial baritone saxophone chair. Benny Powell, often sidelined by illness the past few years, is on trombone. He and Johnson solo infrequently but well. With Winston Byrd on flugelhorn, they fill out the rich ensembles behind Newman’s tenor and alto saxophones. On alto in a piece called “Here Comes Sonny Man,” Newman recalls “Hard Times,” one of the records that made him famous with Charles.
This is basic music mining a rich tradition that grows out of jazz, rhythm and blues and the expansive territory band history of the American Southwest. No one alive does this sort of thing better than Fathead Newman.

Speak low, if you speak love —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 1599

Speak low, when you speak love—Ogden Nash, Kurt Weill, “Speak Low,” One Touch of Venus, 1943

A copy of every jazz album released does not show up at my house. It only seems that way when I look at, maneuver around or trip over stacks of CDs. The stream of review copies arriving by mail, UPS, FedEx and DHL makes it possible for a music writer to keep up with the work of established artists, learn what new ones are up to and hope for revelations, surprises, discoveries. That’s the theory.
The realilty is that listening to music is a linear pursuit. Until there’s a way to inhale or inject it (no jokes, please), the amount of music one human being can absorb is limited to the number of hours in the day minus time for distractions such as eating, sleeping, making a living, staying fit and maintaining agreeable relations with family and friends. There are people who expand their listening hours by employing iPods to pour music into their skulls every waking hour. I have no intention of being one of them. I have heard of a teenager who goes the next step. He retires with ear buds in place, his iPod supplying him through the night with music as he allegedly sleeps. We can only imagine the eventual effect of this practice on his development.
But, I digress. The point is that the accumulation of albums presents an opportunity and a burden. The opportunity is to evaluate a representative sample of what is happening in the music. The burden is one of guilt that stems from the inescapable fact that it is impossible to hear every CD that record companies and individual musicians send in the hope that it will be favorably assessed. The necessity to pick and choose is unavoidable.
Over the next several postings, I will offer observations on some of the recent CDs I have rescued from the stacks, dogged by the certainty that I will overlook something important.

In the quarter of a century during which Marian McPartland has presented Piano Jazz on National Public Radio, her guests have included most of the idiom’s important pianists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ranging in style from Jay McShann to Chick Corea. One of the most rewarding of her programs was in 1984 with the late Shirley Horn. Usually shy and reluctant to verbalize about her music, Horn came out of her shell for McPartland. The two pianists got along beautifully and delivered a supremely relaxed hour of conversation and music. They played with and for one another, and Horn sang—perfectly—three songs. At times, the patter edged into the giddiness of a couple of friends indulging in girl talk. Charming stuff.
When they tackled Don Redman’s 1928 pop song “Cherry” and collided harmonically on its bridge, McPartland and Horn worked their way out of the confusion and laughed about it afterward. Collaborating on a spontaneous blues, each played at the top her game, stimulated and encouraged by the other. There may have been more profound and instructive installments of Piano Jazz—the one with Bill Evans, as an example—but none more enjoyable.
Jazz Alliance, a subsidiary of Concord Records, has issued a new batch of Piano Jazz shows on CD. They include guests Dave Brubeck, Teddy Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and—from the sort-of-, would-be- or near-jazz category—Steely Dan, Elvis Costello and Bruce Hornsby. To check out several of the most recent and older Jazz Alliance releases in the series, go here.

If conventional wisdom and the Nielsen SoundScan survey are right, jazz titles constitute three-to-four percent of CDs. That means that jazz CDs account for about two-million-480-thousand of the 619-million total CD sales Nielsen reports for 2005. Putting aside such value-laden considerations as what constitutes a jazz record or, for that matter, what jazz is, nearly two-and-a-half million CDs sold indicate a substantial audience. Of course, the jazz album market is not large in comparison with the audience for, say, recordings by Arctic Monkeys or Black Eyed Peas (I am not making up those names).
Except for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in the eighteenth century, certain songs of Stephen Foster in the nineteenth, and a few hits during the unreproducable years of the swing era, art music has always been less commercially viable than pop. It probably always will be, whether it is by a jazz piano trio or the Budapest String Quartet. Charlie Parker sold many fewer records than Patti Page. At the height of his jazz-rock success, Miles Davis sold millions fewer than Jimi Hendrix or Sly And The Family Stone. Diana Krall, one current jazz musician who has edged into the pop market, is leagues behind Jennifer Lopez—in terms of sales, that is.
It is not that jazz (and classical) musicians are opposed to popular success, or even that they are unwilling to compromise. The guitarist Jim Hall once said, more or less seriously, “Where do I go to sell out?” But a musician of Hall’s commitment, integrity and talent is unlikely to be able to sell out even if he makes the effort, simply because of his inability to tune into frequencies lower than those of his artistry. Witness trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s Coumbia albums of the 1980s, ineffective as either jazz or pop.
So, what to make of Rewind That by the gifted twenty-two-year-old trumpeter Christian Scott. There is no apparent reason not to take him seriously when he is quoted in a Concord Records news release, “I set out to find my own style to convey how I feel in my heart…” and, “Everyone wanted me to do a straight-ahead album, but that’s like meeting a woman and trying to be like her last boyfriend. You’ve got to be special.”
If individuality is the key to being special in jazz—I am persuaded that it is—good for Scott for wanting to develop his individuality. If, on the other hand, he is devoted to being different for the sake of being different in order to achieve commercial success, he is likely to end up being like the last boyfriend.
From Tod A. Smith’s liner notes for Rewind That:

His music is the language of this era – forged by the sounds of a new generation and developed by the shared experiences of that new generation. And while others may be content with reading the primer for this new language, Christian Scott is writing the definitive style guide.

And

Scott appeared destined to record this music, at this very moment in time. Incorporating the influences of jazz, hip hop, R&B and rock in a Harrison-developed concept called Nouveau Swing.

Harrison is Scott’s uncle, Donald Harrison, the brilliant New Orleans alto saxophonist who made his first splash in jazz in the eighties. I first heard Scott with Harrison’s band at the Estoril, Portugal, jazz festival in 2000, when Scott was seventeen, already an impressive trumpeter. I made a note then to keep an ear out for him. Harrison called not only his concept, but his band, Nouveau Swing. It had the rap and rock underpinnings that Scott was to adopt, but it also embodied swing, the kind of 4/4 groove that grew out of Kansas City in the 1930s and has delineated the rhythmic component of jazz for decades. Rewind That does not have that kind of swing. Rather, it seems to contrive to bend over backward not to swing in the conventional sense (“You’ve got to be special”). As a result, despite Scott’s gorgeous tone, and his range and fluency on the trumpet, the music of his sextet has an oddly static feel throughout much of the album.
The drumming of Thomas Pridgen occasionally hints at New Orlean parade beats but most often concentrates on hip-hop rhythmic sensibilities, as do Linques Curtis’s fragmented, non-linear bass patterns. Straight time is not an element of this collection. That, clearly, is how Scott wants it. Most of the music stutters along to a degree where, ultimately, I found myself excoriating the speakers, “Swing, damn it,” even as I was enchanted by Scott’s soft tone and crisp articulation in the lower register of his horn. As Scott meanders over the rhythmic hesitancies of “Caught Up” and “Paradise Found,” the most unified and satisfying track of the album, an experienced listener taking a blindfold test might conclude that he was hearing Chet Baker.
Walter Smith III’s tenor saxophone solos in the post-Coltrane mold flow nicely, as do the solos of guitarist Matt Stevens. Zaccai Curtis’s Fender-Rhodes piano is employed mostly to provide chords and atmosphere. Donald Harrison, a guest on four tracks, is the most adventurous of the soloists, taking interval leaps that bring life to the piece called “Suicide.”
If Christian Scott is “writing the definitive style guide” for his generation of jazz musicians and his style continues to develop around hip-hop rhythmic values, I am disturbed about where jazz may be headed. In the final analysis, swinging is what differentiates jazz from other music. It will be a challenge to keep paying attention if swinging is phased out. So far, jazz has absorbed and integrated its influences. The optimist in me assumes that it will not be dominated by rap and hip-hop. There is much to like in Mr. Scott’s playing. I shall continue to have an ear out for him and hope that he listens more to Count Basie and Zoot Sims and less to Black Eyed Peas.

Bill Crow, bassist, author and occasional Rifftides correspondent, has taken to the air or the ether, or whatever you call the medium that contains the internet. His new website is a work in progress, as all good websites should be. He writes,

I keep polishing it as I learn the software. Some of the pictures are a little fuzzy, but I think I know how to fix that, as soon as I get time to rescan them.

Well and good, but the photos are fascinating as is. Bill uses many of them to illustrate his biography, from his birth in 1927 to the present. They include shots, from early in his career, of two musicians who would have been among the best known and most admired in jazz if—to grab the nearest handy cliché—their lifestyle choices had been a tad more moderate and they had lived. They were the drummer Buzzy Bridgeford and the tenor saxophonist Freddy Greenwell. Among his slightly better known colleagues are Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, Claude Thornhill, Tommy Flanagan and Bob Brookmeyer, to name a few among dozens. Crow’s discography starts with Mary Lou Williams in 1950. Its most recent entry is a CD with tenor saxophonist Tony Lavorgna, recorded last month.
I am adding billcrowbass.com to the links in the right-hand column, where it shall remain.

The Charlie Parker posting has elicited a number of interesting responses, including this one from Rifftides reader Dave Lull.

The late Esther Bubley took photographs of Charlie Parker and others at a jam session. There are a few of them posted at a web site devoted to Ms Bubley, and more posted here.
From the Esther Bubley Gallery forward:
“Esther Bubley was the photographer at the Norman Granz Jam Session recording in 1952. What is really remarkable about this series of photographs is that they show Charlie in a variety of moods: attentive, jovial, exhausted, nervous, and most of all, respectful towards Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter, both of whom were Charlie’s idols. Barney Kessel said, “The odd thing, I felt more warmth and receptivity from Charlie Parker towards the others than they did to him. […] He was younger and he learned from them. They didn’t learn from him, they’d already left him a legacy; they were already established people before he’d even picked up a horn. He openly admired them”. Esther Bubley’s document of this session is genuinely unique for the photographs not only capture Charlie in the creative process, but are linked to one moment in time.”
These photographs are available in her book Charlie Parker, published in France by Editions Fillipacci, 1995.
Cordially,
Dave Lull

During my New Orleans years, Charlie Parker’s two-chorus solo on “Funky Blues” from the Jam Session album was the theme song of a radio program, Jazz Review, that I did on WDSU. When Cannonball Adderley was a guest one night, the theme came up and he vocalised it in perfect unison with Bird. If only I had cued the engineer to open Cannon’s microphone, we’d have had a classic duet recording.

Good news for radio listeners in Cincinnati, Ohio, or anywhere on the internet: The veteran broadcaster Oscar Treadwell (legendary would not be a hyperbolic term in this case) is back on the air. In his early career, Treadwell was so highly regarded by musicians that Wardell Gray named one of his compositions “Treadin’ With Treadwell,” Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded “An Oscar for Treadwell” and Thelonious Monk wrote “Oska T.”
Treadwell retired in 2001, but a survey of listeners disclosed that they wanted him back and WXVU-FM (91.7) gave him a two-hour slot at 9 pm Eastern Time on Sundays. The station streams its programming live and has an archive of Treadwell’s programs. I have sampled several of them and find him as hip as ever, expert in all eras of jazz; tasteful, to the point and knowledgeable in his comments.
The Rifftides staff thanks reader Dave Barber for calling this to our attention.