In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades... ...because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song … [Read more...]

The Frishberg, Sullivan, Wellstood item in the next exhibit brought quick responses from two men who knew Wellstood well. The first was Ted O'Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster who produced a few Wellstood recordings. Wellstood was one of the brightest men I ever met, never mind how great a pianist … [Read more...]

Dick Wellstood has been on my mind. Maybe it's because I heard Dave Frishberg play the piano the other night at The Seasons. Frishberg was in concert singing his inimitable songs and accompanying himself, but he opened up plenty of space for piano solos. Before he became famous for performing his … [Read more...]

New: Torben Waldorff, Afterburn (ArtistShare). The Danish guitarist accomodates his early rock leanings to absorption with expansive jazz of the kind that thrives in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and is spreading around the world. Waldorff, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist-organist Sam … [Read more...]

In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I'm no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers's introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the … [Read more...]

This is a plea for abandonment of an irritant that infests the English language. The phrase is "if you will." Just now on a news program, an economic spokesman for one of the US presidential candidates (which one doesn't matter; this is not a political comment) said, "if you will" nine times in the … [Read more...]

Not long ago in a Recent Listening in Brief posting, I brushed by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra's new CD. Brevity by no means indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the latest recorded work of that remarkable institution. Will Friedwald, the jazz critic of The New York Sun, is another VJO enthusiast. He … [Read more...]

Summer has us in its grip. The Rifftides staff is regrouping. Assuming that you are being patient, we thank you for your patience. … [Read more...]

Our patience will achieve more than our force. -- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.   Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin; Ay, there, look grim as hell! -- Shakespeare, Othello   Patience and fortitude, Patience and fortitude, … [Read more...]

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist whose technical command set standards for his instrument and who refused to compromise his art, died today at his home in the village of Mauprevoir in France. From Ben Ratliff's obituary of Griffin in today's New York Times: His height -- around five feet five … [Read more...]

Lately, I've been missing Tom Talbert. I went into the archive to see what Rifftides had to say about him following his death a little more than three years ago. Here is one paragraph of the remembrance: Tom died on Saturday, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. An elegant, soft-spoken … [Read more...]

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today--Aaron Copland Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, … [Read more...]

In a 1995 Jazz Times review of a Sylvia Syms CD, I wrote: Sylvia Syms had a vibrato like a telephone wire in a breeze. She sometimes slid around both sides of a note before she settled on it. She often added the syllable "uh" to the end of a word ("ridin' on the moon-uh"). She could pounce on a … [Read more...]

McFarland In the course of writing about Gloria Cheng's new CD (in the next exhibit), I mentioned Gary McFarland's collaboration with Bill Evans, a basic repertoire item in every serious CD collection of twentieth century music. Bill Kirchner includes it in his survey of a dozen essential tracks … [Read more...]

Warne Marsh & Kenny Drew In Copenhagen (Storyville). Recorded in 1980, Marsh--a tenor sax master of subtlety and liquid imagination--plays in a quartet with Drew, one of the brightest graduates of Bud Powell's college of bebop piano knowledge. Marsh has a few "oops" moments in note … [Read more...]

Miguel Zenón, Awake (Marsalis Music). In the DownBeat critics poll results announced in the magazine's August issue, Zenón swept the "Rising Star Alto Saxophone" category and placed sixth among established alto players. That puts him in company with Ornette Coleman, Phil Woods, Lee Konitz, Kenny … [Read more...]

Jo Stafford, a perfect singer, died on Wednesday. She was ninety years old. There will be obituaries this morning in newspapers all over the world. Web sites have them already. Many people who read them will be hearing of her for the first time because in the 1960s, at the top of her game, she … [Read more...]

...An Explanation: As recently as the early 1980s, relatively few major labels made jazz records. Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol, United Artists, Warner Bros, Atlantic and Mercury were the big names. Independent companies that specialized in regular jazz releases included Prestige, Savoy, … [Read more...]