The Rifftides staff has added Marshall Bowden's Jazzitude web site to Other Places in the right-hand column. Befitting its Louisiana origin, Jazzitude is a gumbo of a site. On the menu: news, reviews, features and history sections. If the free enterprise road to the internet future is advertising, … [Read more...]

Good old video keeps surfacing. The new Jazz Icons series of DVDs (about which, more later) is a prime example. Short clips show up on YouTube, Google, Yahoo and whatever new video sites have materialized in the past half hour. A recent addition to the YouTube gallery is a 1961 performance in … [Read more...]

Like Brahms and Bartók late in their careers, Bob Brookmeyer has achieved increased profundity by clarifying his musical palette. The tensions and conflicts that continued to roil his compositions as he emerged from a period of electronics and experimentation in the first half of the 1990s may not … [Read more...]

GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The pig pen smelled like pigs. --William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury … [Read more...]

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.--Maurice Ravel I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.--Igor Stravinsky It's the way you play that makes it . . . Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And … [Read more...]

Phil Woods responds to John Birchard's review of his recent Washington, DC, concert: Hey Doug, Upon reflection, I think the reviewer missed the point of emphysema - it is Nature's way of saying - "Stop playing all those 16ths and find a whole note that means something." Phil … [Read more...]

It's not too late to put a reminder on your listening calendar. Bob Brookmeyer is the subject on Bill Kirchner's Jazz From The Archives tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST on WBGO radio, which you will find at 88.3 on your FM dial if you're in the Newark-New York area and at … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader John Birchard, a Voice of America newscaster, has been attending the Jazz Heritage series of concerts in Washington, DC, and sharing his impressions with us. Here is his latest report. The Rifftides staff has added links to Woods' recorded performances of some of the pieces John … [Read more...]

Gerry Mulligan became famous well beyond jazz circles for his 1950s quartet that included Chet Baker on trumpet, succeeded by Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. Mulligan achieved universal admiration among musicians and a large following of listeners with his Concert Jazz Band, which flourished in … [Read more...]

Referring to the WKCR Lennie Tristano Festival and, on the other hand, the general white bread-with-mayonnaise quality of most radio today, particularly in regard to jazz, DevraDoWrite, observes: I know a lot of dee-jays who are nearly in tears because their bosses, not wanting them to break the … [Read more...]

As I write this, I'm hearing Lennie Tristano talk about his admiration for Charlie Parker. The archived 1973 interview with Tristano, who died in 1978, is a part of a four-day celebration of his music by WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University. WKCR is billing it as a Tristano festival. It … [Read more...]

A recurring theme of this blog is the universality and remarkably consistent quality of jazz in nearly every precinct of the globe. Jay Thomas has done his part to not only stimulate the growth of that quality abroad, but also to see that those of us in the music's homeland get to hear the new … [Read more...]

Thanks to Bob Young of Jazz Boston for adding Rifftides to the links from the site, which chronicles jazz people and events in the Boston area and includes Carol Sloane, Joe Lovano, Danilo Perez, Terri Lynn Carrington and Charlie Kohlhase on its board of artistic advisers. They must be giving good … [Read more...]

In the recent Rifftides piece about Freedom and Josef Skvorecky, I named several jazz musicians from former Communist countries who have risen to the top of their profession. One of them was the Czech pianist Emil Viklický. The world is small and tightly interconnected. A day or two after the piece … [Read more...]

When they played The Seasons the other night, it had been nine months since I heard alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón's quartet. I was impressed with the band at the Portland Jazz Festival and with Zenón's Jíbaro CD. In Feburary, the leader's fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cole had recently replaced the … [Read more...]

From time to time, John Birchard of the Voice of America news staff shares with Rifftides his impressions of musical events in the District of Columbia and environs. Can a ghost band make art? For example, does one consider a Glenn Miller Orchestra led by Sam Donahue capable of creating music that … [Read more...]

Continuing the Adderley theme, a Rifftides reader who identifies himself as El Destiny, sent the following message, which includes a link. This article includes a rare mp3 of Cannonball Adderley jamming with a novelty act of singing squirrels. The article tells the story of jazzman Don Elliott and … [Read more...]

After reading the Rifftides item about Josef Skvorecky's novel The Bass Saxophone, the British bassist, composer and leader Graham Collier wrote: Some years ago I suggested to BBC radio that they adapt The Bass Saxophone, which they duly did with my music. Art Themen, best known as a tenor sax … [Read more...]

Any day now could be the last good one of the year for cycling, so I said goodbye to work and took advantage of a late October afternoon so perfect that to have left it out there by itself would have been a shame. Deciding not to pit the road bike against heavy, skitterish Friday traffic, I left it … [Read more...]