He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns … [Read more...]

One year ago, the pianist George Cables gave his listeners a moment of music so vivid that I was moved to write of it, ...he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive. You may go here to read about that concert. Cables' playing that … [Read more...]

Even if I am fighting my way out of a thicket of deadlines, as I am at the moment, when a Jim Ferguson CD arrives, I stop what I'm doing and listen to it. Fortunately for the viability of the exchequer, that doesn't happen often. The most recent Ferguson album came the day before yesterday. The … [Read more...]

Pete Candoli was an iron man in an iron-man calling. He played lead trumpet in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton, Les Brown, Count Basie, Freddy Slack, Tex Beneke, Jerry Gray, Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman...among others. He became famous as Superman With A Horn in Woody … [Read more...]

Rifftides Readers sometimes send useful tips. Here are three: Pianist Emil Viklický called our attention to this YouTube clip of him and two other Czech musicians sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie's band in a 1990 concert. In a moment of geographic confusion, Diz introduces them as our "Yugoslav … [Read more...]

It was a piano weekend in apple, wine and snow country in the shadow of the Cascade mountains. Two of the premier jazz pianists of the twenty-first century played here. Fresh from Los Angeles, Jan Lundgren had just recorded for Fresh Sound Records a trio CD of the music of Ralph Rainger. Bassist … [Read more...]

Through our Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard, Rifftides has updated you from time to time on the fight against the Bush administration's attempt to dismantle or downgrade the English language broadcasts of the Voice Of America. Birchard reports that there has been, if not an all-out … [Read more...]

In the 1950s and early sixties, there was a vogue for combining jazz and poetry. It wasn't new. Poets as far back as Langston Hughes in the 1920s read their work in collaboration with jazz musicians, usually in the privacy of homes, rarely in public. Thirty years later the idea sprang up again in … [Read more...]

As far as I know, Pete Winslow never recorded his poetry, with or without a jazz group, but I played once while he read. Pete and I were in journalism school together at the University of Washington. He edited the campus humor magazine and sometimes wrote poetry for it under the pseudonym Eleanor H. … [Read more...]

Here is part of a Rifftides piece from last March: When I listen to the two-track analog stereo recordings Roy DuNann made for the Contemporary label shortly after the perfection of stereo in the 1950s, I curse the boneheads who, because they could, introduced multi-track, multi-microphone … [Read more...]

If you go to the right-hand column and scroll down to Doug's Picks, you will find five new recommendations. To browse back through more than a year-and-a-half of recommendations, click on "More Picks" at the end of the current batch. … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader Jim Denham sent a message reminding us that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Red Allen. Allen was the New Orleans veteran whom in the 1960s the iconoclastic young trumpeter Don Ellis famously called "the most avant garde trumpet player in New York." Ellis is … [Read more...]

Roger Kellaway, still high on the news of his award by the French, sent a succinct message with a link. The link takes you to a performance by Zoot Sims. The transcription blowup on the wall behind the bandstand identifies the club as the lamented Donte's in Los Angeles. Here is Roger's message in … [Read more...]

Big cities do not have exclusive rights to major jazz artists. First-rank musicians play performance halls in small and medium-sized towns that New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tokyo may think of as the hinterlands. Here are five US examples, among dozens. Saturday, January 12, pianist … [Read more...]

Home computers and cell phones became realities after Paul Desmond died in 1977. Given his fascination with electronic devices, I am certain that if he were alive, he would be addicted to all things digital. Paul would love the idea of a program shooting through the ether into a computer and onto a … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader Rich Juliano comments on the Jaki Byard item in the previous exhibit : Back in 1985 Jaki was a clinician at the Tri-C Jazz Festival in Cleveland where I grew up. As an aspiring jazz pianist I was excited to attend his piano clinic but terrified when he asked for duet partners and … [Read more...]

Reading Gary Giddins's tribute to Jaki Byard in the February Jazz Times stimulated memories of that astounding pianist. Giddins builds his article around the CD called Sunshine Of My Soul, reviewed in Rifftides last March. The magazine is now on news stands. The piece is not available on … [Read more...]

New Year's Day - Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.--Mark Twain The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, … [Read more...]

Hugh Massingberd, the longtime obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London, died on Christmas day at the age of sixty. From 1986 to 1994, Massingberd converted the dullest page in the paper into one so entertaining that his obits were collected in six anthologies. In her obituary of Massingberd in … [Read more...]