An early September posting on Rifftides discussed Czech President Václav Klaus’s involvement with and support of jazz. In it, I quoted a communique from the fine Czech pianist Emil Viklický:

There is a new CD coming out from Prague Castle – George Mraz’s 60th birthday. Multisonic asked me to help with mixing and arranging things since George himself is not here in Prague. I will push Multisonic owner, Mr. Karel Vagner, to have better distribution for abroad.

That CD of a concert honoring and featuring Mraz has just been issued. The great bassist performs with four colleagues with whom he grew up in music in Czechoslovakia, decades before that nation split, peacefully, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Viklický and Karel Ružička share piano duties. Rudolf Dašek plays guitar. Ivan Smažík, Mraz’s grade school companion from Tábor in southern Bohemia, is the drummer. These men are in the top tier of Czech jazz players who weathered communist domination of their country and culture and lived to see their nation independent after the wall came down. By then, Jiří Mraz had become George, moved to the United States and established himself as one of the best bassists in the world. Whenever he goes home, it is an occasion. He has had no grander homecoming than this concert at the Czech equivalent of the White House. Mraz is introduced and praised by the president of his native land and given a birthday party. As Jan Beránek points out in his literate, informed liner notes, it happened once before, when Richard Nixon threw a birthday celebration for Duke Ellington.
So much for the honor. How is the music? It is full of spirit, warmth and virtuosity. Except for one number, Mraz is omnipresent, playing with impeccable technique, perfect time, and feeling that radiates from his Moravian heart and blues soul. He was born in southern Bohemia, but as a boy spent his summers in Moravia and soaked up its music. Moravian music, with its predominance of minor keys, has stylistic similarites to blues. Major and minor thirds often coexist in the same Moravian songs. It is no surprise that musicians like Mraz and Viklický gravitated toward jazz. Their work together in Mraz’s CD Moravá concentrates on Moravian material melded with jazz
Mraz’s playing on the unaccompanied first number of this new album, the traditional “White Falcon, Fly,” is enough to make grown men weep, if they happen to be bassists. The rest of the program consists of standards (“For All We Know,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Rhythm-a-ning”) and compositions by Mraz, Ružička and guitarist Dašek, who was once Mraz’s bandleader. Mraz’s “Picturesque” has bass-guitar unison passages intimating that he may have had his bass predecessor Oscar Pettiford in mind when he wrote it. Mraz sits out for Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning,” a two-piano performance by Viklický and Ružička so marinated in jazz piano vocabulary and grammar and—well—rhythm, not to mention humor, that it suggests an album of their collaborations is not just a good idea but mandatory. Mraz mastered arco playing in his studies at the Prague Conservatory, then refined his mastery, as his bowing on his “Blues for Sarka” testifies. Ružička’s “Streamin’” melds jazz sensibility with that Moravian minor-thirds feeling, and Mraz has a stunning solo.
If you know people who feel that Europeans don’t quite have the hang of jazz, this CD would be a splendid means of convincing them otherwise. About the matter of the Multisonic label distributing abroad; I hope that it comes about. In the meantime, it is possible to order from this Czech website, which also offers MP3 samples of the music. My experience is that the Jazzport site is reliable.

Rifftides readers interested in knowing more about the great drummer and arranger Tiny Kahn (discussed in this posting) will find it in Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men—The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years. From Korall’s chapter on Kahn:

His drumming made bands sound better than they ever had before, particularly during his last years when he had all the elements of his style in enviable balance. His time was perfect—right down the center. He wasn’t too tense or too laid-back. Kahn had his own sound and techniques on drums and could be quite expressive, using his hands and feet in a manner that was his alone.

Musicians remember how easy his charts were to perform; they felt right for all the instruments and never failed to communicate and make a comment. His unpretentious writing mirrored his concern for expressing ideas in an economical, telling swinging manner.

Kahn’s intellectual and cultural breadth matched his physical size. The pianist Lou Levy told Korall, “He alerted me to Al Cohn and Johnny Mandel. Kahn-Cohn-Mandel became the three wise men, as far as I was concerned. Tiny also introduced me to Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith.” Korall’s book covers bop drummers from the transitional figures (Jo Jones, Sid Catlett) through the innovators (Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Stan Levey, Shelly Manne) to the important and obscure (Ike Day). Its predecessor volume treated drumming in the swing era with similar scope, detail and insight. Both of Korall’s books belong in anyone’s basic library of books about jazz.
Thanks to artsjournal.com blogmate Terry Teachout for jogging my memory about Drummin’ Men.

Stan Levey was two years younger than Kahn, but in 1944, at eighteen, was Dizzy Gillespie’s drummer and provided Kahn with lessons by example. Nearly a decade younger than Levey, Artt Frank was fifteen in 1948 when he frequented 52nd Street, convinced Levey that he was serious about learning to play and, for his sincerity, received instruction. Neither Levey, Kahn nor Frank had the almost supernatural technique of Max Roach, the reigning bop drum master. What they had in common was unerring time, intelligence, hearing keenly attuned to their bandmates and the flexibility to provide the contrasting rhythmic elements of steadiness and punctuation that bebop soloists needed for support and inspiration. Frank is not as well known as many modern drummers, but he is respected and admired by musicians as diverse as Dave Brubeck and Dave Liebman and has worked with a wide range of players. His longest association was with Chet Baker, who has often been quoted as saying that Frank was his favorite drummer.

Frank’s book, Essentials for the Bebop Drummer, is fundamentally an instruction book for drummers, but it has other values. Among them are his anecdotal story of evolving from a poor boy growing up in a little town in Maine into a drummer encouraged by Charlie Parker; explanations of bop rhythms that laymen can understand; and a CD in which he and fellow drummer Pete Swann illustrate the lessons. The CD also has tracks of Frank demonstrating the practical application of the patterns he teaches as he performs with colleagues in the Southwest. He makes his home in Tucson. On a couple of pieces, he also sings, an activity that he evidently intends to pursue further. I find the book entertaining and helpful. I think I’ll get out an old set of brushes that has been languishing in a drawer, sit down with a large piece of cardboard on my lap and see if I can master a couple of Frank’s basic left hand exercises.

Where will we find new jazz writers and critics? At least one will develop his or her chops under the sponsorship of Jerry Jazz Musician. Joe Maita, the proprietor of that estimable web site, is holding a competition to choose someone fourteen to seventeen years old to become a columnist for JJM. If you are in that age group or know someone who is and might qualify, you can find details here. Writer Gary Giddins and singer Dee Dee Bridgewater will choose the winner. And may the best youth win.

The comprehensive boxed set Count Basie and his Orchestra: America’s # 1 Band (Columbia/Legacy) has been out for a couple of years during which I have played it so often that if it was on vinyl LPs, I’d have worn them out. Its four CDs contain the most important Columbia recordings of the Basie band from late 1936 through the end of 1940. It was some of the most influential music of the period—indeed, of any period. Lester Young’s other-worldly tenor saxophone solos were one reason (in the notes, Sonny Rollins is quoted as wondering what planet Young appeared from).
There were plenty of other reasons: the ball-bearing propulsion of the celebrated all-American rhythm section, Harry Edison’s eliptical trumpet solos, Buck Clayton’s glittering ones, the speaking-laughing trombone solos of Dickie Wells, the spare perfection of Basie’s piano interjections, spare arrangements that swung off the paper or out of the collective heads of the band.
The set also has a selection of superior Basie tracks made after Young left the band in December of 1940, through the spring of 1951, when bebop had changed the landscape and the big band era had declined but not quite fallen. In the last of them, the band had important transitional swing-to-bop players, among them tenor saxophonists Wardell Gray and Lucky Thompson and trumpeter Clark Terry. The book of arrangements had works by Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron and Neal Hefti, hinting at Basie’s coming transition from the loose, swinging outfit he had led for twenty years to a machine-tooled juggernaut oriented more toward arrangers than soloists.
All of the music on the first three CDs in the set has been previously issued to a faretheewell, though never before in so comprehensive a fashion or with such clear sound. What makes the box indispensable is the inclusion of a fourth CD of previously unavailable air checks of the 1939-1941 band in broadcasts from the Famous Door, the Savoy Ballroom, the Meadowbrook Lounge and the Café Society Uptown. To hear the Basieites playing in their workaday world for audiences that came to dance and listen is a revelation. The radio microphones captured an element that virtually never exists in a studio, the human connection between performers and their audience. There is a sense that, sixty-five years apart, we and the musicians and those appreciative audiences are sharing the same space. The soloists are not necessarily playing better than they did in the studio, although the solos are full of surprises simply because they are different from the ones on the same tunes in the studio versions. But the sense of their engagement is palpable. There is lots of “new” Lester Young, and lots of young Harry Edison telling silver truths through his muted horn, and there are rides on carpets of rhythm launched by Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jo Jones.
There is someone else: Billie Holiday. She sang with Basie for a year, but had a contract with a different record company and was not allowed to record with him. Three 1937 pieces from the air checks let us, at last, understand why so many people who heard her with Basie have written and talked about it as the ultimate Holiday experience. Her use of rhythm, her time sense, allows her to float above the ensemble much as Young did, taking the same kinds of chances with phrasing, stretching without effort across the bar lines. She has transformed her Louis Armstrong inspiration into a marvel of individual artistry. Her way with lyrics is unlike that of any singer at the time other than Armstrong’s. My guess is that her example had a profound effect on Bing Crosby, who was the country’s star vocalist when she emerged.
If you want to know who was influencing the young Frank Sinatra, if you have any doubt where Peggy Lee came from, listen to Holiday on “I Can’t Get Started” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Hear her turn the silly “Swing, Brother, Swing” into a triumph. The delightful Helen Humes does some of her best singing with Basie on these air checks, but Billie Holiday is transcendent.

Responding to the Rifftides posting about La Scena Musicale, Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento, California, led us to his colleague Jeff Hudson’s interview with the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli. This site has Hudson’s short and longer interviews with Bartoli and excerpts of her singing. Many jazz musicians and listeners are put off by opera, but the range, purity, power and sheer beauty of Bartoli’s voice may make a convert or two.

Speaking of being led, here’s a double lead. On the home page of the Bill Evans website, I found a link to a blog about classical music that has an erudite, informed posting about Evans. Among other interesting facts about the great pianist, the anonymous author of the blog called On An Overgrown Path discloses that Evans influenced the modernist composer Gyorgy Ligeti as Ligeti was creating his Etudes for solo piano. Further exploration of the site turned up valuable pieces on Messiaen, Beethoven and one of my favorite Swedish pianists, Jan Johansson, among many other musicians. I’m making On An Overgrown Path a habit and adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Happy birthday to one of my favorite fellow bloggers, DevraDoWrite, who reports that it’s going to be more or less business as usual today. But there is nothing usual about her business, which, at the moment, includes writing a biography of Luther Henderson, an underheralded figure in twentieth century music.

And now, a visit from the lovely and popular Mea Culpa.
Please disregard the arranger credits contained in this posting of two days ago. Johnny Mandel did not arrange “TNT,” “Blue Room,” “Who Fard That Shot?,” “My Heart Stood Still” and “Jeepers Creepers.” After faithful reader Russell Chase cast doubt on my assertion that the charts were Mandel’s, I asked Fantasy’s Terri Hinte for a copy of the reissue CD. When it arrived, I found that in the original liner notes, George T. Simon wrote that the arrangements were by Tiny Kahn. In a telephone conversation, Mandel confirmed it. He and Kahn were friends from the time they were both fifteen years old, growing up in New York City. Mandel went on at length about his admiration for Kahn, who was a rarity, one of the few drummers in jazz who was also a gifted composer and arranger.
“In fact, I don’t know of any others at the time, except for Louis Bellson,” he said. “I loved Tiny Kahn.”
Kahn, who was not tiny, died of a massive heart attack in 1953, when he was twenty-nine years old. He had worked in the big bands of Herbie Fields, Georgie Auld, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman, Chubby Jackson and Charlie Barnet and was the drummer in a brilliant Stan Getz quintet that also featured guitarist Jimmy Raney and pianist Al Haig. His discography is enormous for a man who died so young.
When arrangers gather, they discuss Kahn as a peer of and influence on Mandel, Al Cohn and Gerry Mulligan. “He was a truly great musician and a very funny man,” Mandel told me. “I think he would have been the best of us all, if he had lived, and if he wasn’t working as a standup comic.”
There are three verified Mandel arrangements in the the Elliott Lawrence CD in question. They are “Tenderly,” “Moten Swing” and his adaptation of the Noro Morales arrangement of “Ponce.”

Persistance and dumb luck have solved the computer conundrum that derailed Rifftides for a couple of days. Thanks for your forebearance. You did forebear, didn’t you? At any rate, we’re back on the tracks.