In the 1950s when UCLA football coach Red Sanders (pictured left) said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he could not have known that his sports philosophy would be adapted to virtually every human endeavor. Being number one is the overriding aim not only in sports, but also in politics and international relations—as we keep hearing from the White House—and in business and the arts. Hence, there is consternation at this week’s news trumpeted in Billboard magazine that sales of CDs are so far down that the Best Buy chain will stop carrying them and Target stores may not be far behind. At the root of the change, of course, is the digital revolution; music downloaded from the Internet seems to be replacing music embedded in spinning discs.

Reports about the decline in CD sales invariably include statistics showing that jazz recordings sell at more or less the same numbers as those of classical music—perhaps implying that there is reason to regret that Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Mozart and Stravinsky reach audiences of similar size. Serious listeners will wish jazz and classical CD companies and their distributors the best, regardless of how the music is delivered, but as CDs go the way of LPs it is not hard to feel pangs of regret. Oh, wait a minute—vinyl is making a modest comeback, however unlikely it is to replace CDs. Or downloads.

Speaking of vinyl, I’ll mention a couple of fairly recent LP reissues that have kept the Rifftides turntable busy:

Joe Henderson’s The Elements (1974) is nicely remastered on the Milestone label. It contains the tenor saxophonist’s compositions “Fire,” “Air,” “Water” and “Earth” and has a distinguished cast that includes pianist Alice Coltrane, bassist Charlie Haden, violinist Michael White, percussionist Kenneth Nash and, on two tracks, drummer Ndugu Leon Chancler, who died last weekend at age 65. One of the most adventurous albums in Henderson’s discography, it finds him and his colleagues indulging mid-1970s jazz tendencies toward eastern spiritualism and mysticism. Among other attractions, Haden has a remarkable solo, accompanied by Nash’s special acoustic effects, on “Earth.” The track also contains vocal interjections by Henderson and his tenor mingling with White’s violin. The album is engrossing and not typical of Henderson’s music during this, or any other, period.

 

Wayne Horvitz, 55: Music In Dance And Concrete (Other Room Music)

In 2014 Horvitz, the restlessly exploratory composer, went underground for this experience in sound. With him in the caverns and huge cistern of Fort Warden, a former military base near Seattle, were a choreographer, dancers, audio engineers, and musicians playing string, reed and brass instruments. Horvitz explains in his articulate notes that he wrote 55 pieces of music and spent several days recording the musicians’ improvisations, taking advantage of the natural reverberations of the caverns and cistern. Extensive post-production followed.

The resulting music is haunting, unpredictable. Horvitz observes, “The various ambiences themselves created such a seductive palette that it was easy to stay inspired.” He added later that there was, “– a multitude of ideas happening simultaneously, so there’s more to discover every time you listen to it.”

This music can seduce you.

Vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake has instructed hundreds of aspiring jazz musicians in the techniques and mysteries of improvisation. Among his early students was Ted Nash (pictured), who as a young man left Los Angeles, became a stalwart of New York’s jazz community, and wins Grammys. Nash has long been a featured soloist in the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra. Mr. Shoemake sent the following message today:

 

A former student of mine sent me this video of Ted Nash performing at Lincoln Center a week or so ago. I was floored by the beauty of his performance. To know that I got him started from scratch when he was 14 and to hear him now is a huge thrill and high for me.

Among the many Canadian musicians attracting the attention of listeners outside Canada is the pianist and singer Laila Biali. She was born in Vancouver, B.C., in 1980 and trained in classical piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Much of her popularity stems from recordings and videos covering hits by pop performers including Coldplay, David Bowie and Neil Young, but it’s her piano playing and arranging that have made impressions among jazz audiences. Here, Ms. Biali and her frequent bassist George Koller perform the traditional song “Down In The River To Pray.” Although research has failed to trace the piece to an individual, it is frequently attributed to an anonymous African-American slave. Ms. Biali’s brief piano solo suggests that she and the late Ray Bryant may have had common influences.

Hugh Masekela, a hero of African popular music and an inspirational fighter against discrimination, died today in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was 78. Masekela’s rapid ascent to fame in the 1950s led to international recognition of his trumpet playing and his protests against his country’s apartheid policy that for decades subjugated South Africa’s black people. By the time of his 1968 hit “Grazing In The Grass,” he was a prominent figure in world culture. Masekela was a tenacious force in demanding that Nelson Mandela be released from his 27-year prison sentence. His song “Stimela (Coal Train)” was one of his most powerful expressions in that camaign. In this video, he performs it at a festival near London in 1986, four years before Mandela’s sentence ended and he went on to become the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

See this New York Times obituary for a complete account of Masekela’s life.

Hugh Masekela, RIP.

The music of trumpeter, composer and resolute individualist Wadada Leo Smith is absorbing. It often has a demanding density even when he is the only player—as he is in one of these albums. It can bring rewards to the listener who accepts Smith’s free jazz heritage and listens to him with open ears and open mind. As in his recent tribute to America’s national parks, his paean to Miles Davis, duets with pianist Vijay Iyer and a succession of other albums over the years, Smith has a vision that embraces Lennie Tristano, Ornette Coleman, Chicago’s AACM movement and John Coltrane, among other artists who as early as the late 1950s began liberating their work from standard jazz approaches.

In Smith’s album of music by and about Thelonious Monk he is alone with his trumpet. That creates a conceptual challenge for the player of an instrument incapable of harmonic accompaniment. He compensates by employing passing tones to fill in or imply harmonies. The canny Smith’s familiarity with chord substitutions and his formidable trumpet technique make for thrills and occasional amusement, as when he leaps high above the staff to nail precisely the only note that would work at a certain point in his variations on “Ruby, My Dear.” As in most of his albums, Smith’s nicely crafted liner essay answers questions about his titles. He explains that “Monk And His Five Point Ring At The Five Spot Café,” for instance, was inspired by a clip from a documentary about Monk. The occasion that titled “Monk and Bud Powell at Shea Stadium” may never have happened in real life, but in a dream that Smith remembers. Nothing in his playing directly evokes either pianist. Some titles need no explanation; it tends to be general knowledge among Monk followers that “Crepuscle With Nellie” was for his wife. Smith gives the melody a loving late-evening interpretation ending on a lingering high B-flat. When Smith uses his Harmon mute, as he does on “Adagio: Monk, the Composer in Sepia,” his inner Miles Davis emerges. The influence is pronounced. Earlier in the album, essentially the same piece with an altered title is without the mute. Smith also caresses “’Round Midnight” on open horn, playing it slowly. The mood is not unlike those that Davis often created on ballads. When Smith plays the occasional note with cracked edges, it’s natural to wonder who he was thinking of.

There is little question about that in Smith’s Najwa. The album features the electric bass and production skills of Bill Laswell, a veteran of the Downtown movement in New York City in the 1970s. Like Smith, Laswell is partial to the electronic Miles Davis. Their fondness for that idiom helps determine Najwa’s atmosphere. Smith has a long history with three of the guitarists here, Michael Gregory Jackson, Brandon Ross and Henry Kaiser. He has a newer, family, relationship with the fourth guitarist, Lamar Smith, his grandson, who has performed with him since 2009, been a member of Wadada Leo’s Organic Ensemble and Silver Orchestra and was on the Yo Miles! album. From the first track, evocative of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, much of the album’s power rides on Laswell’s bass lines, often in harness with the drumming of Pheeroan akLaff, a Detroit native with a forty-year history in the free jazz sphere. In its titles as well as its music, Najwa constitutes tributes to Coleman, John Coltrane, the late drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and Billie Holiday. The ten-minute Holiday track is entitled, “The Empress, Lady Day: In a Rainbow Garden, with Yellow-Gold Hot Springs, Surrounded by Exotic Plants and Flowers.” The other titles, in Smith’s poetic way with words, are nearly as long. Throughout, Smith’s playing is infectious even in his muted work in the slow title tune. By far the shortest piece in the album, its mystery and languor and the melancholy of Smith’s muted solo keep me going back to it.

From New York comes news that the singer Marlene VerPlanck died today at 84. She reportedly had pancreatic cancer but managed to keep the illness a secret from nearly everyone. Beginning in the 1960s Ms. VerPlanck worked closely with her husband Billy as a studio musician, singing in commercial jingles. In the 1970s she began singing in jazz clubs and at festivals and appeared at Carnegie Hall. Billy VerPlanck died in 2009. By then his wife’s career as a jazz performer had blossomed. She was in demand in the US and became popular in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, appearing at Ronnie Scott’s club in London and touring  in England and on the continent.

Here she is in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2014 with Maxim Baghuis at the piano and Erk Albjerg on bass.

Months ago, the picture below showed up as an email attachment.

Here is what I don’t know:

Where the photo came from.

The location of Bakers Table Restaurant; a Google search discloses that there are several in the world.

The maker and history of that wonderful bugle.

What music might be a suitable companion. How about “Moon Dreams?”

Maurice Peress, a conductor who served as a link between jazz and classical music, died over the weekend at his home in New York. He was 87. Peress collaborated with Duke Ellington in preparing the composer’s 1943 “Black, Brown And Beige” for performance by a symphony orchestra. He also worked closely with New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein in adapting Bernstein’s “Mass” and works by Charles Ives for symphony performance. When he was conductor of the Kansas City Philharmonic, a performance by Ellington’s band deeply affected Peress. In his 2004 book, Dvorak To Duke Ellington, he wrote:

I was fired up, wondering how a symphony conductor like myself could take part in this important music, music that spoke to me as profoundly as any other, music that reached out and embraced everyone.

Peress found effective ways to adapt Ellington for symphonic presentation. Here, he conducts the American Composers Orchestra in four of the sections of Ellington’s “Black, Brown And Beige,” first played by the Ellington Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1943.

Django Bates’ Belovèd, The Study Of Touch (ECM)

Following his engrossing participation in Anouar Brahem’s Blue Maqams, pianist Bates returns to ECM with his trio in nine of his compositions, a Charlie Parker piece and one by British saxophonist Iain Ballamy. In the Blue Maquams review, I wrote, “For his soft touch and canny harmonies, Bates was a perfect choice.” His approach to the keyboard is the central attraction in this trio collection, as much for his gentle release of notes as for his soft initial keystrokes. That is not to suggest that there is anything resembling cocktail or background music in his approach to the instrument. This is an album that deserves—indeed, requires—attention. If aspects of pianists like John Lewis, Bill Evans and Tommy Flanagan come to mind, Bates’s touch is unlikely to be mistaken for theirs. The depth and substance of his chords buoy virtually every passage, including those in the trio’s brief romp through Bates’s reworking of Parker’s “Passport,” which has rhythmic quirks that may challenge the listener’s ability to recognize that the piece is a blues. Ballamy’s “This World” has lyricism with a quiet melodic and harmonic suggestion of “Danny Boy.” Bates fills it with flowing expression that blooms just short of outright pianistic display.

There is nothing in Bates’s work here that has quite the thrusting intensity of his interaction with Brahem’s oud in parts of Blue Maqams. Still, the subtle flow of energy among Bates and his longtime sidemen, bassist Petter Eidh and drummer Peter Brun, is a primary factor in the success of an album that seems likely to be a highlight of jazz releases in 2018.

Once in a while, Rifftides indulges in a rerun. As we all ease back into our post-holiday routines, let’s once again enjoy a double visit to one of the great small groups in modern jazz. When this post first  ran last year, it was titled:

The Milt Jackson Quartet Then And Then

A video of The Modern Jazz Quartet has been getting wide viewership on the internet. The YouTube presentation does not disclose that the group we see and hear is the MJQ’s predecessor, the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band from 1946 to the early fifties. To give his brass section rests during concerts, Gillespie occasionally featured interludes with vibraharpist Milt Jackson, pianist John Lewis, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke. They first recorded as an entity in 1951 as the Milt Jackson Quartet. After Percy Heath replaced Brown the following year the group changed its name to The Modern Jazz Quartet. When Clarke concentrated on freelancing around New York in 1955 and then moved to Paris, Connie Kay assumed the drum chair.

The group we see and hear in the video is the Milt Jackson Quartet reunited. History aside, the music is what matters. The four old friends are clearly delighted to be together, and something is amusing them during their performance of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight.” The brief onscreen title in German near the beginning translates as “Jazz in a Christmas Night.” YouTube provides no information about where the concert was, or when. From the musicians’ appearances, my guess is that this was the 1990s. YouTube identifies the drummer as Kay, but it’s Clarke.

Over the years, the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” took on new colors and quirky solo turns each time the band played it, as they invariably did in their New Year’s Eve engagements. Once in the 1960s, my wife and I saw Ellington’s eyebrows elevate in surprise as, unannounced, the dance they were playing for transmogrified into a fashion show. Suddenly, models were gliding along in front of the bandstand. Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton and other members of the band extended their solos as the brass and reed sections improvised new instrumental backgrounds for the traditional New Year’s song.

By the time they took the piece into the studio in 1966, parts of it had settled into familiar patterns but, of course, there were new solo adventures. Here, Cootie Williams does the improvising.