I may post something more today, or I may just flop into the long Fourth of July weekend and emerge on Monday or Tuesday. When you see, e-mail or telephone your friends, be sure to tell them about Rifftides. We need all the Rifftiders we can get.

Ending our survey of a few of the CDs that piled up while Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond was occupying the author, here are brief observations on three more.
Mulgrew Miller, Live At Yoshi’s, volumes one and two. One of the most consistently interesting pianists in jazz, Miller has in his trio Derrick Hodge, a new bassist to keep your ears on, and the rapidly developing drummer Karriem Riggins. Horace Silver’s “Peace,” Victor Feldman’s “Joshua” and Donald Brown’s “Waltz for Monk” are highlights.
Dexter Gordon, The Complete Prestige Recordings. This is everything the great tenor man recorded for Prestige from 1950 to 1973, eleven CDs’ worth, with a who’s-who of sidemen, peers and guests, from Wardell Gray to Freddie Hubbard. It’s Gordon in all of his complexity, subtlety and power. No retrospective this comprehensive can be A-plus throughout, but triumphs of the quality of “Fried Bananas,” “Stanley the Steamer,” “Body and Soul” and Dexter’s two-tenor collaborations with James Moody, uneven as they are in spots, carry the day.
Zoot Sims Recorded Live at e.j.’s Aug. 9, 1981 Atlanta, Georgia is the comprehensive title of a surprise released nearly twenty years after Sims’s death. With a fine local rhythm section, Zoot played the club in high spirits, sparring hilariously on three pieces with the Atlanta tenor man Rick Bell. As if to remind us that categorizing him as a descendant of Lester Young is too facile, he opens his “Take the ‘A’ Train” solo with a phrase that is pure Coleman Hawkins.

I have just been informed that WNYC radio in New York archived my June 23 appearance on The Leonard Lopate Show. It was a zippy thirteen-minute discussion of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. You can listen to it here. It’s the second item from the bottom of the page.
Joe Maita’s long interview with the author is transcribed on the Jerry Jazz Musician website. It is integrated with samples of Desmond’s playing and a few photographs from the book, in a skillfully assembled package. While you’re there, browse his site, which is loaded with riches and rewards. But hurry back.

My ArtsJournal colleague Terry Teachout points to a development in German publishing that he says should be of concern to all writers. I agree. It should also disturb readers dependent upon authors free of interference with their work. The situation involves a new biography of Carl Jung, the seminal (I hope that’s not too Freudian) psychoanalyst. Given the concern of jazz musicians and listeners with freedom of expression, I think that friends of Rifftides will find it important. To read the item, go to Watch On The Rhine in Terry’s Arts About Last Night web log.

Benny Carter died on July 12, 2003. His absence is made a little easier to bear with EMI’s reissue of a rare 1960 album originally on United Artists. The CD is Sax a la Carter, with Jimmy Rowles, Leroy Vinnegar and Mel Lewis. The programs begins with “And The Angels Sing” in shuffle rhythm, possibly to honor or tweak Jonah Jones, a trumpet sideman from Carter’s 1941 band who had a series of easy-listening shuffle hits in the late fifties. Lewis provides a shuffle beat that is essence of shuffling. Following eleven other standards, including a classic “If I Loved You,” Benny concludes with two of his own songs, neither well known. One is “Friendly Islands”, a bit of mild exotica that Martin Denny also recorded. On “Ennui,” heard for the first time on this CD, he plays the flowing melody on soprano saxophone, an instrument he should have employed more often. It lasts two minutes and nineteen seconds, with no improvisation, and it is glorious. None of the pieces runs longer than four minutes. That is as much time as Carter needed, as much as Rowles needed, to be memorable.
One of Benny’s biggest fans, Phil Woods, is teaming up these days with Bud Shank for appearances that might be billed as Two Tough Old Altos. I saw them, backed by Bill Mays, Joe LaBarbera and Chuck Deardorf, bring a festival audience of 1500 to its feet, cheering. The partnership is the jazz equivalent not of Grumpy Old Men, but The Sunshine Boys. It has produced the splendid CD Bouncing With Bud and Phil Live At Yoshi’s, recommended for two weeks now in the Doug’s Picks section in the right-hand column, and for good reason.
By 1959, Woods had established himself as one of New York’s hottest alto saxophone players—hot in terms of the emotional temperature he created in his solos and of demand for his services. That year, Quincy Jones landed Woods for his new big band, which went to Europe with Harold Arlen’s musical (often described as a blues opera) Free and Easy. The show soon folded, but Jones struggled to keep the band together and Phil stayed with it until it finally dissolved. The two bonded musically and personally. Jones went on to other endeavors, including movies scores and stewardship of Michael Jackson’s career, and eventually spun off almost entirely into pop music. I remember Phil saying a few years ago that he was happy about his pal’s success, but asking, plaintively, “couldn’t he make a jazz album at least every few years?”
That hasn’t happened, not with fealty to the straight-ahead jazz to which Woods remains committed. So, Phil made the album and called it This Is How I Feel About Quincy. Jones wrote all but one of the tunes, and his great ones are there, “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “Meet Benny Bailey,” “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set” and that delightful product of Jones’s early career, “Jessica’s Day.” The Woods Quintet with Brian Lynch, Bill Charlap, Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodwin is augmented with four horns to fill out the splendid arrangements by Woods (and one of “The Pawnbroker” by Lynch). Following a thoughtful and sinewy solo by Woods, his arrangement of “Stockholm Sweetnin’” encompasses a transcription of Clifford Brown’s famous trumpet solo alternated among combinations of the band’s eight melody instruments.
The playing by all hands is at the highest level. The Woods composition “Q’s Delight” is a tribute to his friend, but the entire album honors Quincy Jones by renewing and validating his music in its purest state, something that Jones himself has chosen not to do.

Yesterday I declared at an end the discussion of alternative approaches to improvisation, with a proviso: “Unless someone out there has a new take on this matter.” If you’re just joining us, the focus of the dialogue (or diablog) was the late tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins. The inquiry was into how much he knew about chords and whether he elected to play outside of them in spite of his knowledge, or because he lacked knowledge. Vibraharpist and teacher Charlie Shoemake responded to my original post about Perkins’s continuing growth and adventurousness, as did critic Larry Kart.
When accomplished composer-arrangers like Mike Longo and Bill Kirchner — theoreticians and talented soloists — weigh in, it would be rude and irresponsible not to allow them the virtual floor. Therefore, the discussion is reopened. (It’s wonderful to be your own editor and publisher). Let me suggest, even if you are not educated in theory and harmony, that you follow along here because the gist of what our guest experts offer can improve our listening ability, regardless of whether we know an F minor 7th chord from a Harmon mute. First, this communique from Mike Longo, leader and pianist of the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble.
MIKE LONGO

Just a note about the harmonic discussion centering around Bill Perkins, especially in connection with the comparison to Wayne Shorter in terms of the use of notes that are apparently not in the prevailing chord structure. Wayne, like many of today’s contemporary players, has embraced 20th century harmonic thinking which is rooted in intervalic playing. Once intervalic logic has been activated, notes that appear to be outside the spelling of the harmonic structure seem to sound related. This is because the logic of intervals has taken over.
For example, one may play an interval sequence that outlines an Fm7 chord and then play the same sequence a half step up and it will sound related to the original chord, even though on paper it may appear to be the tones of an F#m7 chord being played against an Fm7. In fact, it is merely a sequence of the intervals just heard, deflected up a half step. Therefore, the ear accepts it as related. These are practices employed by 20th century composers such as Bartok and Stravinsky and are outlined in a book by Vincent Persichetti called 20th Century Harmony which has become quite an influence on many contemporary jazz musicians.

In addition to his composing, arranging and playing, Bill Kirchner is a band leader, annotator (in depth) of Mosaic boxes, historian and editor of the invaluable Oxford Companion to Jazz.
BILL KIRCHNER
In jazz, improvising “outside the chords” goes back more than 50 years. For an early example of “sideslipping” (Jerry Coker’s term, I believe), hear Lennie Tristano’s 1955 recording of “Line Up” (based on “All of Me”). Tristano frequently uses phrases a half-step away from the basic chord scales. George Russell also pioneered in jazz bitonality in his writing as far back as 1949–hear his big-band charts on “A Bird in Igor’s Yard” (for Buddy DeFranco)* and “Similau” (for Artie Shaw).

In the early ’60s, John Coltrane extended this practice and probably did more than anyone to make what saxophonist Dave Liebman calls
“chromaticism” (in a jazz sense) part of the basic harmonic language
of this music. When playing on tunes like “Impressions,” Coltrane would superimpose phrases in several different tonalities on top of a basic tonality (e.g., D minor). Also, what’s called intervalic playing became popular; for an example of a tune written in that style (in this case, fourths), check out Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance”. Go to any jazz school in the world today, and you’ll hear this stuff coming out of the practice rooms.

Bill Perkins, being an intellectually curious man, checked all this
out in depth and to an extent incorporated it into his playing. However, Perkins came out of the Lester Young tradition; Young and
most of his disciples, as Charlie Shoemake pointed out, were “ear
players” in the best sense. Whatever they knew or didn’t know about
chords (Al Cohn, for one, knew a lot), harmony really wasn’t the
primary feature of their styles. Rather, it was melodic (linear)
playing, usually on simple changes. When I listen to Zoot Sims, I
don’t listen for a dazzling harmonic conception; he of course had
other virtues.(Though Stan Getz could play well on harmonically
challenging tunes like “Con Alma” when he wanted to.)

So, if Perkins once played an A natural against an F minor 7 chord, he could have made a mistake, or he could have been sideslipping to
produce an intentional momentary dissonance. Context and melodic
intent make an enormous difference. As pianist Jim McNeely once
remarked about his tenure with Getz, you don’t go to a player like
Getz and tell him that such-and-such a note doesn’t work against a
certain chord; a strong, well-placed melodic phrase usually will
override harmonic considerations. A great player can make “wrong”
notes work. As the Lunceford record said, “‘Tain’t Whatcha Do, It’s
the Way Thatcha Do It.”

By the way, for those seriously interested in these and similar
matters, I recommend Dave Liebman’s book A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody (Advance Music).

I won’t again make so bold as to say that’s the end of this conversation. Let’s see what happens.
*”A Bird in Igor’s Yard” is neary impossible to find on CD, but this link takes you to a box set that allegedly has it. Good luck, and let me know if you find it.

It’s time to put a wrap on the discussion about whether Bill Perkins knew the chord structures of pieces on which he improvised. You may recall that vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake, who played with Perkins, wasn’t convinced either way. Critic Larry Kart thought that Perk probably did know the chords but felt free to depart from harmonic guidelines that he thoroughy understood. Unless someone out there has a new take on this matter, Shoemake gets the last word.

Larry Kart could be right if he’s evaluating from Bill’s late recordings (which I don’t own). My observations came from standing next to him on the bandstand (here in Cambria and elsewhere). When I hear someone play an A natural half note on an F minor 7 chord, I figure that he either doesn’t know anything about chord changes or doesn’t care where they fall, a la Wayne Shorter.

We’re still catching up with CDs that appeared while I was writing Paul Desmond’s biography. If you don’t have your copy of the book yet, hurry.
ORBITAL DUKE
Columbia/Legacy is systematically reissuing (again) everything it has by Duke Ellington. In the case of Blues In Orbit, it has done so with class and thoroughness, from the inclusion of previously unissued pieces and alternate takes, to digital remastering that brings out nuances, to Patricia Willard’s informative new notes. The back-cover blurb calling Blues In Orbit an undervalued gem is accurate. In the late fifties, Ellington and Billy Strayhorn were writing intriguing things into new compositions and old ones alike, and the album radiates the feeling of discovery even on “C Jam Blues” and “In A Mellow Tone,” which the band had played hundreds of times. Johnny Hodges was back after a layoff and sounds happy to be home.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE
Emil Viklicky, a Czech born in Moravia in 1948, is one of the finest jazz pianists in the world. His standing in his own country may be inferred from that fact that last year when President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic initiated a series of jazz concerts at Prague Castle, the counterpart of the White House, Viklicky and his trio were the first performers. That concert, with the Swiss trumpeter Franco Ambrosetti as guest artist, was recorded and is available as Franco Ambrosetti & Emil Viklicky Trio (Multisonic 31 0644-2). Ambrosetti at first lessens the impact of his inventiveness by using excessive volume, but his ideas ultimately carry the day. Viklicky, bassist Frantisek Uhlir and drummer Laco Tropp are wonderful throughout, and sublime on the final three pieces, with Ambrosetti sitting out. Trying to negotiate the complex Multisonic website is frustrating. It would be easier to send the company an e-mail message to find out how to order. The CD is worth the trouble. (Can you imagine George W. Bush honoring jazz with a series of recitals at the White House?)
Here is a short list of other recent CDs that have given me pleasure or stimulation or at least kept my attention:
Ken Peplowski, Easy To Remember. Peplowski plays a varied program that includes a lovely unaccompanied clarinet solo on Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” and a tenor sax romp on Al Cohn’s “High on You.” There is fine work by Al’s guitarist son Joe and pianist Ted Rosenthal.
Branford Marsalis, Eternal. Quartet music by the saxophonist balancing originals with standards, among them the old Nat Cole ballad “The Ruby and the Pearl.” The title piece is well named; it runs eighteen minutes and holds up thanks to Marsalis’s continuity of ideas and cohesive accompaniment by pianist Joey Calderazzo and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. You want liner notes? The booklet tells you to download them from Marsalis’s web site. Puzzling consumer relations, putting the information burden on the customer.
Metz’n Around. Pianist Ed Metz, Sr. with drummer Ed, Jr., other family members and friends in oldies like “’Deed I Do,” “Little Rock Getaway” and “Goody Goody.” Infectious fun, and worth a few hearings for the solos of John Allred, a great trombonist.
Jane Monheit, Taking A Chance On Love. Imitative and overhyped at the beginning, she is now a grownup singer with her own personality and a touch too much vibrato in the middle register.
The Mildred Bailey Radio Shows.Three programs from 1945 with Bailey singing perfectly, of course, and exchanging scripted banter with guests Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey and Cozy Cole. The big band backing her has Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Red Norvo and Jimmy Maxwell, among others. What a singer.
Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow, Billy Drummond, The Lost Chords. This is really Bley’s record, and it’s laced with her angular humor as well as her profundity. Its opening suite is based on “Three Blind Mice.” One of the movements has a subsection titled “Leonard Feather.” Her notes are not about the music but about the group’s travails on a tour of Europe, complete with a map and amusing photographs. The music is excellent.
Enrico Pieranunzi, Paul Motian, Doorways. The Italian pianist and the former Bill Evans drummer in a series of pieces that are free and sound composed or are composed and sound free. When saxophonist Chris Potter joins them on three tracks, the result is nothing like Lester Young, Nat Cole and Buddy Rich. Abstract, luxuriant music.
Tomorrow: A few thoughts about Benny Carter and Phil Woods, among others.

Reissuing important music in impeccably produced editions, Mosaic Records continues to thrive. Its most recent box set is The Complete Clef/Verve Count Basie Fifties Studio Recordings. I just finished a long review of the album for Jazz Times. Watch for it in the September 35th anniversary issue.
Another recent Mosaic gem is The Complete Argo/Mercury Art Farmer, Benny Golson Jazztet Sessions. Farmer and Golson were in the thick of the hard bop movement of the 1950s and early sixties. Together, they transcended hard bop’s orthodoxies, Farmer with his incomparable melodic inventions on trumpet and flugelhorn, Golson as a writer of memorable tunes and pungent arrangements and as a lusty tenor saxophonist under the spell of Don Byas and Lucky Thompson. They reached what Gene Lees described in Down Beat in 1960 as “a balanced amalgam of formal written structure and free blowing — the long-sought Grail of jazz.” That balance is responsible for the music’s sounding fresh more than forty years later, along with remarkably undated playing by the leaders and their changing cast of sidemen.
The pianists were McCoy Tyner, Cedar Walton and Harold Mabern; the bassists Addison Farmer, Herbie Lewis and Tommy Williams; the trombonists Curtis Fuller, Tom McIntosh and Grachan Moncur III; the drummers Lex Humphries, Tootie Heath and Roy McCurdy. The seven CDs in the Mosaic box encompass everything the Jazztet recorded in its 1960-’62 incarnation (Farmer and Golson reassembled the band briefly in the 1980s), as well as individual dates by the leaders. They include four of the best quartet albums of the decade, Golson’s Free and Turning Point and Farmer’s Art and Perception. Both of Farmer’s and one of Golson’s quartet dates have Tommy Flanagan, the other Golson has Wynton Kelly, two of the most influential pianists in modern jazz. The box also contains Listen To Art Farmer And The Orchestra with Oliver Nelson’s arrangements, and Golson’s clever Take A Number From 1 To 10, in which he starts alone and adds one instrument per track until he has a tentet. In the twenty-page booklet, Bob Blumenthal contributes a deeply researched essay and track-by-track analysis.
With the Farmer/Golson bonanza coming on the heels of its monumental Complete Columbia Recordings Of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers 1945-1947, Mosaic is having a good run. As usual. The label’s Mosaic Select series of smaller boxes brings together in three CDs five Bob Brookmeyer albums from the fifties. It includes two rarities, Brookmeyer’s ten-inch 1954 Pacific Jazz quartet album with John Williams, Red Mitchell and Frank Isola, and The Street Swingers with guitarists Jim Hall and Jimmy Raney, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Osie Johnson. Mint copies of The Street Swingers LP have gone to Japanese collectors for hundreds of dollars. It’s good of Mosaic to rescue it from the archives for listeners of more modest means.
Brookmeyer long since passed safely through what he has called his “music to make your teeth hurt” period. For an idea of what he is up to these days, I recommend his Waltzing With Zoe for writing in a league that he and Bill Holman, among contemporary arranger-composers, occupy alone. Maria Schneider and Jim McNeely are stars of the farm club.
For Brookmeyer’s small group work on valve trombone, try Island, a challenging collaboration with Kenny Wheeler, possibly the most surprising trumpet soloist alive. John Snyder has revived his Artists House as a nonprofit organization and taken it into leading-edge multi-media production and education. Artists House includes in The Island package not only the CD but also a DVD with scenes of the recording session, interviews with the musicians and printable scores. To find Island on the Artists House website, click on “Contact” on the right side of the screen.
Snyder just completed his first academic season as Conrad Hilton Eminent Scholar and Director of Music Industry Studies at Loyola University in New Orleans. In case those Artists House and teaching involvements don’t keep him busy enough, he has also taken on stewardship of a series of musicians’ master classes at New York University. The Artists House web site presents streaming video of classes conducted by Benny Golson, Cecil Taylor, Percy and Jimmy Heath, Barry Harris and Clark Terry. The only one I’ve seen all the way through is Taylor’s. His question and answer session with NYU students is, like his music and his life, intriguing performance art.

When I stay with my friend Jack Brownlow(page 267 in The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond), he often comes up with special entertainment. Yesterday, it was a couple of episodes of The Beiderbecke Connection, a 1988 series from Granada, the British TV network. Jack’s daughter checked it out from the public library on VHS, but it is also available here on DVD. Trevor Chaplin and the adorable Barbara Flynn play the lead characters, unmarried school teachers with a child they call “the firstborn” because they can’t agree on a name for him. The couple have a talent for trouble when they try to accomodate beguiling, unscrupulous friends who request favors with a slightly illegal tinge.
Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker, among other jazz figures, come up casually in conversation among the characters. The scoring by Frank Ricotti, a musician previously unknown to me, functions well with the action of this mystery spoof. Ricotti is a vibraharpist and in one sequence leads his band in an episode that takes place in a London club called, oddly, The Village Vanguard. One of the few television series to incorporate running references to jazz and jazz artists, it features welcome subtlety and humor in script, acting and direction. Perhaps you’ve noticed that we don’t see much of that in domestic television these days.