Well, as long as we’re on other matters, how about Randolph Scott? Video stores, at least the ones where I live, do not have his movies for rent. There’s no theater within 800 miles of here that’s likely to run one, let alone mount a Randolph Scott film festival. I got hooked on his laconic, righteous cowboy character years ago, and I miss him.
It came as no surprise to learn that artsjournal.com colleague Terry Teachout also appreciates Scott. After reading the long piece about Scott that Terry wrote for American Cowboy magazine, I searched the net for DVDs of Scott pictures and found that a few are available, including the remarkable Seven Men From Now. In his Westerns, Scott had flint in his visage, his convictions and his resolve. His films are simple, short and satisfying. Here’s a paragraph from Terry’s article about Scott.

He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginia accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.

For the whole thing, click here. It’s a terrific read.

Artsjournal.com Commander-in-Chief Doug McClennan posted a lead to a BBC Radio report on the likelihood of New Orleans musicians returning home to a city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. It’s another good reason to regularly check the AJA home page.
The Beeb’s Stephen Evans has two reports, one in print, one a superb broadcast documentary. You needn’t agree with his editorial conclusion that Wynton Marsalis is “the world’s greatest trumpeter – classical or jazz” to admire the thoroughness of his reporting on the background of New Orleans music and its perilous future. But you’re likely to love hearing Ellis Marsalis, Wynton’s dad, propound his theory that if the English and not the French had ended up with New Orleans, there would be no jazz. To read and hear Evans’s reports, click here.

Eric Felten, trombonist, singer, band leader and occasional Rifftides correspondent, is a talented free lance writer. Now and then he does a column—“How’s Your Drink?”—for the weekend Wall Street Journal. This weekend, his topic is single malt scotches. In our affluent culture, single malts have become a passion of people who, a few years ago, might have been coveting rare cigars. Felten reports that some single malts sell for more than $50,000 a bottle.

Driving these prices are extremely limited quantities. The Dalmore 62 was created in 2002 when the distillery combined what it had from four old casks — 1868, 1878, 1926 and 1939 — yielding just enough whiskey to fill 12 bottles. Most of the rare single-malt scotches are bottled from individual casks, which, depending on the type, hold from 200 to 500 liters when filled. But when old casks are finally tapped, they give up far less than that. Evaporation steals between 1% and 2% of the whiskey every year — the “angels’ share,” as it is called.

I wish that I could link you to the column, but the Journal restricts its online content to electronic edition subscribers. The best alternative is to pick up a print copy of the weekend edition published today.
The Personal Journal section also includes a short list of Diana Krall’s favorite Christmas recordings. Her own new CD would be on my short list, if for no other reason than her moving treatment of Irving Berlin’s “Count Your Blessings.” The Christmas album is a lovely way for Krall to bounce back after the boredom of her excursion into pop territory, The Girl In The Other Room.

If Paul Desmond had lived, he would be eighty-one years old today. His last birthday, in 1977, fell on Thanksgiving. For the occasion, Devra Hall cooked a turkey dinner for Desmond and her parents, Jim and Jane. Here’s the end of the story of that visit, told by Devra in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

“It was a very quiet dinner. Paul was not feeling well, but he was clearly happy not to be home alone. He didn’t have to say a word around my folks. They talked a blue streak, usually, but he was just very comfortable. My fondest recollection is that I made him dinner on his last birthday.”

The senior Halls and Desmond went back to Jim and Jane’s apartment when they left Devra’s, and on the way stopped at the Village Vanguard. Thelonious Monk was performing there. Between sets, they all gathered in the Vanguard’s kitchen, the closest thing the club has to a Green Room.

“It was the most coherent conversation I ever had with Thelonious,” Hall said, “in the kitchen with Paul and me and Thelonious. I had a sort of nodding acquaintance with Monk, but he and Paul really connected. I’m not even sure what they talked about, just standing around in that kitchen, going through old memories and things. It was nice.”

This is an important American national holiday. To those of the U.S. persuasion, the Rifftides staff sends wishes for a happy Thanksgiving. To readers around the world: we are grateful for your interest and attendance.

The trumpet is an extremely difficult instrument. It feels and reacts differently to the player each and every day—Allen Vizzutti

Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds
pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the
horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins—Dizzy Gillespie

You pick up the horn, put it to your chops and the son of a bitch says: Screw You—Roy Eldridge

I have never seen a country where they worry so much about their chops as they do in America—Maurice Andre

One of the joys of listening to The Bill Holman Band the past decade or so has been the opening minute of “No Joy In Mudville.” Over an insistent one-bar riff figure repeated by the saxophones, Bob Enevoldsen plays a valve trombone solo of pure exuberance. It is the first track in Holman’s CD A View From The Side. It was, almost invariably, the first piece he called when the band performed. I write “was” because the bad news is that Enevoldsen died last Saturday. In a palpable sense, he was central to the spirit of that great band, as he was to jazz on the west coast for more than half a century.
In Leonard Feather’s and Ira Gitler’s Biographical Encylopedia of Jazz, his entry begins,

ENEVOLDSEN, BOB (ROBERT MARTIN), v-tbn., tbn, bs, bari horn, tr sax, etc. b Billings, MT, 9/11/20

That “etc.” covers arranging. Enevoldsen was a superb arranger and ochestrator and, when the occasion arose, an effective and congenial leader. He was best known for his valve trombone and in greatest demand on that horn, but he was also a tenor saxophonist with original ideas and a fetching graininess in his tone. He shines on both horns in his own group and with Harry Babasin’s quintet in Jazz In Hollywood, a CD reissue of 1954 recordings from the Nocturne label. In the fifties when his trombone chops went temporarily into decline, Enevoldsen switched to bass and continued to make a living. There’s a bit of his bass playing on the Babasin recordings.
Much of his income came from work in Los Angeles television and movie studios, which offered economic survival for many top-flight jazz artists. But his heart was in jazz, and he left a fifty-year trail of memorable performances and recordings with Holman, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers, Bob Florence, Bob Crosby, Tex Beneke, Mel Tormé, the Lighthouse All-Stars, Henry Mancini and Terry Gibbs, to name a few in the wide range of musicians who insisted on his services.
A burly man, after he worked up a crop of facial hair and took on some age he came to resemble St. Nicholas with a neatly trimmed beard. Enevoldsen was hampered the past several years by the circulation problems that led to his death, but he kept working. His daughter drove him to rehearsals and gigs and helped him onto the bandstand. Bill Holman told me yesterday that Enevoldsen’s physical problems disappeared once the band started playing. “When it was time for him to solo,” Holman said, “the years fell away.”
Bob Enevoldsen: never a star, never a household name, always a pleasure to hear; gone at eighty-five.

Two weeks ago, Rifftides examined one aspect of the film Good Night, and Good Luck, which tells the story of Edward R. Murrow’s pursuit of the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. The entry included this:

CBS head William S. Paley’s demotion of Murrow established the primacy of network profit over news integrity. It set up conditions for the MBA mentality that meshed with technology and the rise of cable networks to produce the broadcast and cable news we have today in which, with few exceptions, the line between information and entertainment has been blurred beyond distinction.

To read the whole thing, go here.
Three days before my posting, in her invaluable Serious Popcorn, fellow artsjournal.com blogger Martha Bayles recognized the point about commerce versus journalistic independence. As one would expect of a film critic with finely tuned political antennae, her posting ranges more widely through the film’s messages. She praises director George Clooney for not taking a direct route along the road of what she calls “righteous Hollywood anti-communism.”

No, Clooney went for the slightly less burned-over district of TV news in its early fluid state, before it hardened into the monstrous shape we know and love today. Not surprisingly, the red meat here is anti-anti-communism – or if you prefer, red-baiter-baiting, performed at the highest level of photogenic integrity. The film neither stresses nor denies the fact that Murrow came late to this cause. By the time his program, “See It Now,” jumped on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, it was already loaded with radio commentators, print journalists and editorialists, congressmen and senators from both parties, military brass, and the Eisenhower White House.

But no matter. If this movie achieves anything beyond flogging the well pulped carcass of McCarthy, that achievement will be its portrayal of how unfree TV was during its so-called Golden Age.

Bayles refers to and agrees with the warning by Murrow’s contemporary, the critic Gilbert Seldes, that television’s power to persuade is neutral, as potentially dangerous in the hands of bad guys as it can be beneficial in the hands of good ones like Murrow. Her conclusion that the film “totally shuts out the concerns that made McCarthy’s witch hunt possible” assumes that moviegoers who were alive then have short memories and that those who weren’t are uneducated about American history. That may be at least half right. In any case, her piece stimulates thought about the uses of journalism, television and political power. To read all of Bayles’s review of Good Night And Good Luck, go to Serious Popcorn.

A check of tracking information discloses that Rifftides has readers today in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Bermuda, Russia, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand and all parts of the United States including Lampasas, Texas; Aliso Viejo, California; and Lithonia, Georgia.
Welcome. Come back soon. Tell your friends.

What constitutes a jazz standard? Purists may contend that only an original composition by a jazz musician qualifies—“Confirmation,” “Doxy,” “Sail Away,” “Seven Come Eleven,” as examples. Working musicians and fake books say otherwise; a jazz standard is a song, adaptable to improvisation, that has worked its way into the general repertoire. An entire website is devoted to that proposition.
JazzStandards.com was put together by jazz aficionados and musicians who saw the need for a centralized source of information about the tunes most often played in jazz. The site ranks jazz standards from 1 to 1000 in order of importance and frequency of performance. It has documentation and links for the first hundred songs. Number one, hardly a surprise, is “Body and Soul.” The information about it and the other top 100 runs from basic…

Because of its complex chord progressions, “Body and Soul” remains a favorite of jazz musicians. The unusual changes in key and tempo are also highly attractive and provide a large degree of improvisational freedom.

to technical…

A very motivic melody, thus easily remembered. Noteworthy is the use of the penultimate “blue note” (flatted third) at the end of “A,” – easily missed by the untrained or novice performer. The harmonic progression seems to be controlled by the movement of the bass line, descending and ascending by step (Ebm –Bb7/D – Ebm7/Db – Ab/C – Db – Ab9/Eb – Db/F –EËš7 – Ebm – Ebm7/Db – Cm7(b5)) before returning to the tonic via the circle of fifths, using parallel minor substitutions.

Each song’s profile includes its history, recommended recordings, links to CD samples, links to books about the songs and their composers and, in some cases, musicians’ comments on the pieces.

In the forty years I’ve played “’Round Midnight,” I’ve done so to my satisfaction perhaps a dozen times at most. It’s one of the hardest for me in that, to play it really correctly, you can’t use those “fake book” changes; you have to use the Monk changes or it sounds silly (to me). —Jessica Williams

JazzStandards.com needs musicians’ comments on more of the listed songs, and it cries for something it probably can’t have—lyrics. It would be daunting and expensive to get clearances for publication of words to the majority of songs that are in copyright. Those, however, are minor deficiencies in a website whose complex facets are wrapped into a design that’s easy to navigate. JazzStandards.com is a resource for musicians and researchers, and rewarding for anyone interested in song. The site was founded by Jeremy Wilson and is edited by Sandra Burlingame, who also writes much of it.