David Liebman, the perpetually searching saxophonist, has been playing festivals all over the world. He emphasizes that he is not complaining, but he is disturbed by the reaction of people attending those high-priced events.

If anything concerning the question of communication is at all relevant, it is for me about the degree of successful interaction between band members. Doing this to the best of our abilities is the mechanism for demonstrating our respect for the audience. Miles used to say when he turned his back, it was to play to the band so they could hear him better.

(Just to be sure we are on the same page, I am obviously talking about the kind of audience that is there to hear jazz by design, not by mistake. In other words, opening for the Rolling Stones for example is just not relevant to this discussion.)

…Therefore when I look out and “vibe” the audiences I have encountered this summer ranging from Los Angeles to Rome to down the road from where I live, it amazes me that so many people can just sit there and not react at all. It seems the bigger the gig and the higher the fee, the more tepid the reaction.

To read all of Liebman’s essay. go to his newsletter, Intervals.

Nearly three years ago, I reviewed in Jazz Times a CD that pianist Kenny Barron recorded with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley at Bradley’s, the lamented Greenwich Village club.

Barron takes “Solar” at a fast clip that does nothing to suppress his development of original melodic ideas or inventiveness in voicings. There’s not a cliche to be heard. Drummond aces another solo, Riley and Barron exchange eights and the three go into a long tag ending that culminates in a densely harmonic Latin vamp. It is an exciting performance.

To read the whole review, go here.
Sunnyside Records has issued a second volume of performances from Barron’s 1996 Bradley’s engagement and subtitled it, “The Perfect Set,” a claim with which I have no argument. On a solo version of Thelonious Monk’s seldom-heard “Shuffle Boil,” Barron’s harmonic and rhythmic wizardry includes what sound like references to the crippled cadences of stride masters like Donald Lambert and James P. Johnson. The trio follows with a fourteen-minute workout on Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” that took my breath away the first time I heard it…and the second. The title of Barron’s “The Only One” alludes to Monk. The melody line and the improvisation have Thelonious written all over them.
It was not an entirely Monk evening. Barron’s “Twilight Song,” a ballad tinted with Latin accents, and a quarter-hour exploration of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” complete the perfect set. There are few improvisers whom I care to hear play anything for fifteen minutes. Kenny Barron is one of them.
Not incidentally, the beautifully recorded piano on which Barron performs is the Baldwin grand that Paul Desmond willed to Bradley’s. Since the club’s demise, it has been on loan to The Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit club in Lower Manhattan. On page 310 of The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, you will find a picture of Renee Rosnes sitting at it. You didn’t think I’d pass up a chance to plug the book, did you?

Mark Stryker’s column in today’s Detroit Free Press is about the alto saxophonist Charles McPherson. Here’s some of what McPherson told Stryker about his school days, when he studied with the pianist Barry Harris, another Detroiter:

One day I came home from school and I had my report card, and he asked to see it. I was a C student; I didn’t try for anything more than that. He saw the C’s and he said, ‘You’re quite average, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m passing.’

He said, ‘You can’t be average and play the kind of music you’re trying to learn. There’s too much going on. Charlie Parker is not average. Your heroes are above average.’

It was like a little epiphany. It totally changed my life. I put in more effort and instead of being a C student I got A’s. I started getting interested in literature. I read Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ and I started reading philosophers, for instance, Francis Bacon, Kant, Schopenhauer.

McPherson is interesting on Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lonnie Hillyer and himself. You can read all of Stryker’s piece here.

Here is the critic A.B. Spellman on Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking Change Of The Century album.

A large part of the credit I believe must be given to the rhythm section. Because in Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins you have two Hall of Fame musicians. And this rhythm section again was working with a different kind of sense of accents. You had a strong melodic lead in the bass of Charlie Haden, because without a piano, the bass then has more responsibility for sort of leading the group. The responsiveness of this particular rhythm section would not permit for (sic) a dead spot.

That is from the transcript of a broadcast conversation between Spellman and Murray Horwitz of the American Film Institute. Their dialogues are central to National Public Radio’s mini-programs centered around a basic library of 100 essential jazz recordings. Because of scarce air time, the radio installments are short, but many of the web site versions include at least one musical illustration; in the case of Change Of The Century the complete six-minutes of Coleman’s “Una Muy Bonita.”
Anyone could argue about what is on and not on the list, but the NPR choices constitute a fine basic library. If you have never heard Bix Beiderbecke’s golden “I’m Coming Virginia,” you can have it..all of it…here. Then, next time you hear one of a few thousand trumpet players steal Bix’s tag phrase, you’ll know where it came from, even if the soloist doesn’t. If you have somehow missed bassist Sam Jones’ and drummer Arthur Taylor’s hand-in-glove support of Thelonious Monk in Monk’s famous Town Hall big band concert, NPR gives you the complete “Thelonious.”
The explanations by Spellman and Horwitz (sometimes Horwitz alone) are as basic as the library itself; the segments run only about three minutes apiece. Still, if you know someone who is just entering jazz as a listener you could do much worse than recommend NPR’s introductory course.

Alec Wilder on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On The Ritz.”

Berlin keeps you totally off-balance until the fifth bar, where he sensibly lands on a whole note tied to a half note and then whips you with the title phrase in eighth notes. The release, again sensibly, he leaves for the most part unrhythmic. The structure is straight A-A-B-A. It’s a marvelous song.

Wilder: American Popular Song (Oxford)

DevraDoWrite is peeved about website inadequacies and excesses and doesn’t mind saying so. As an example:

Ineffective site search tool – If you do any kind of research, search tools are invaluable. I believe that sites with a lot of content, be they static or ever changing and growing blogs, should provide a search tool specific to that site. On this blog, for example, you can search for Luther Henderson and see a listing of only those posts in which his name appears.

Amen to that and all of her other gripes. I wish that I had Devra’s technical grasp of this medium. Please notice that THIS site has a search tool. It’s that little blank box in the right-hand column. Don’t bother looking for Kenny G.

Dave Brubeck, touring at eight-four as if he were twenty-four, is in California—momentarily. Saturday night at eight, he will play in Sacramento at the Radisson Hotel Grove Amphitheater with his quartet (Bobby Militello, alto saxophone; Michael Moore, bass; Randy Jones, drums). A few weeks ago at Carnegie Hall, during the JVC Jazz Festival Newport, Brubeck began noodling one of his introductions designed to mystify his sidemen. It is one thing for a pianist to play an obscure introduction to a piece in the band’s repertoire. Erroll Garner made a specialty of it. It is quite another to offer an inscrutable introduction to a song the band has never played. Few leaders outside the bailiwick of free jazz would take that chance in a major concert, but I have often seen Brubeck do it. At World Series time a couple of years ago, he sprang “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” on the quartet. Once they figured out what the boss was pitching, they knocked it out of the park—er—theater.
At Carnegie, it began to dawn on Militello, Moore and Jones that Brubeck was slyly unveiling “Sleep,” a 1923 chestnut by Earl Lebieg that for years was the theme song of Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. Although a few jazz musicians, including Benny Carter and Tommy Dorsey, recorded it, “Sleep” hardly became a staple of the repertoire. I’d bet that most jazz players don’t know it exists. The Brubeck group had certainly never played it together, but Militello, Moore and Jones were just old enough to have it lurking in their consciousnesses. Once the puzzlement subsided, grins appeared on the sidemens’ faces. They exchanged glances, took a simultaneous deep breath and dove in. “Sleep” is not “Giant Steps” in the chord changes department. To call the song simple may be upgrading it. The structure and melody are basic—two sixteen-bar sections that are nearly identical. But this was a demonstration of the truth of the Sy Oliver-Trummy Young maxim, ‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That’Cha Do It). The piece developed momentum, good cheer and, ultimately, an intensity that captivated the audience. It was the hit of the evening, and it was no mere novelty. It was thoroughly creative music making.
I was standing backstage next to the tenor saxophonist Harry Allen. As a member of John Pizzarrelli’s band, he was about to follow Brubeck. We listened and watched on monitors, and Allen said, “Can you believe the way these guys are swinging?”
In addition to springing surprises with simple tunes, Brubeck continues his complex older ways. He works in time signatures, polyrhythms and polytonalities that, after a half-century of his pioneering them in jazz, few other musicians have tackled, let alone mastered. One who has them comfortably in mind and under his fingers is Joe Gilman, a pianist who might be much better known as a player if he didn’t devote himself primarily to education. Gilman is one of the teachers at the Brubeck Institute Summer Colony for gifted young jazz players and a professor at American River College in California. He can not only play Brubeck’s demanding music, he can also explain it, as he does in a five-and-a-half-minute radio piece produced by Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento. You can hear it by clicking here and then clicking on the “listen” icon on the Capitol Public Radio page.

…he has an undergraduate degree in piano and jazz studies from Indiana University, a masters from the Eastman school and a doctorate in education from Sarasota University. There is more on his background here. Gilman, with six CDs under his belt, is a teacher who can do. His albums date back to 1987. One from 1992 has drummer Bob Hurst and Jeff “Tain” Watts as sidemen and the brilliant tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson as guest soloist.
In the course of his teaching, Gilman has become an expert on Brubeck’s music. Not a mimic of Brubeck’s playing style, he has more in common with bop and post-bop players. His Time Again: Brubeck Revisited, volume 1 and volume 2 present twenty Brubeck compositions. “In Your Own Sweet Way” is included, as are “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” in a wildly cartoonish version on prepared piano. He also interprets such less-well-known pieces as “Recuerdo,” “There Will Be No Tomorrow” and the stirring “Love and Anger.” Gilman is accompanied by bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown. They take unBrubeckian approaches to “Blue Rondo” and “Summer Song,” to single out just two examples. Gilman sees “The Duke,” as less Ellingtonian than like a Velvet Gentleman with a touch of decidedly unarthritic atonality in the left hand.
Brubeck appreciates adventurousness by others as much as he enjoys committing it. He is reported to be delighted with Gilman’s versions of his songs.

The Rifftides staff is always glad to hear from you. We direct your attention to the e-mail address in the right-hand column.
And we promise that there will soon appear new items in Doug’s Picks.

Today I made a round-trip drive of six hours for an hour-and-a-half meeting that could have been completed in thirty minutes or a twenty-minute conference call. While motoring, I auditioned several CDs that I promised to listen to, only one of which was rewarding. As a result, my blogspiration index is lower than my blood sugar and the level of fuel in my gas tank. That’s low. A good night’s sleep and relief of the temporary hypoglycemia should send me back into action. In other words, there will be no new posting for at least a few hours, maybe not until tomorrow.
In the meantime, remember to check in with the mother of all artsjournal.com bloggers, ArtsJournal, and the AJ webloggers to whom Rifftides links in the right-hand column. These people know their stuff.