Classic Savoy BeBop Sessions 1945-49

Just a quick run-through of the names involved in this ten- CD set might be enough to whet the curiosity of the uninitiated and the appetites of devotees of the music that changed jazz in the 1940s. A few of them: Bud Powell, Allen Eager, Milt Jackson, Fats Navarro, James Moody, Tadd Dameron, George Wallington. Not to mention Art Blakey, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Stitt, J.J. Johnson and Brew Moore. Mosaic Records has assembled and remastered dozens of performances from the period when Savoy Records was at the top of the bebop heap. The tracks include master takes and alternates brought up to high sonic standards. This is a major box-set event, even in the light of Mosaic’s enviable track record.

Coleman Hawkins made the tenor saxophone a jazz instrument. Bud Freeman (1906-1991), two years younger than Hawkins, followed as another of the horn’s early masters. Freeman (pictured) started on C-melody saxophone and was a member of Chicago’s Austin High Gang, which also included Frank Teschemacher, Dave Tough and Jimmy McPartland. After he switched to tenor sax in the mid-1920s he went on to play with Ben Pollack, Red Nichols, Ray Noble, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Eddie Condon, among many others. He called his own band The Summa Cum Laude Orchestra. His tone was light compared with most other tenor saxophonists of his era, and almost without vibrato. Freeman was one of the rare early jazz pioneers who became interested in new forms; in the 1950s he studied with Lennie Tristano.

In the mid-1960s, Freeman was a guest on Jazz Alley, a television program hosted by his Chicago pianist contemporary Art Hodes. In this segment, Hodes begins by introducing the young soprano saxophohnist Bob Wilber, who does not play, and then Freeman, who does. The bassist is R.L. Wilson, the drummer Bob Cousins. Not all of the introductions are distinct, so here is the tune list: “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Dinah” and “Three Little Words.”

Rifftides reader Arthur Hill writes from somewhere in Oregon:

Yes, Virginia—there is a jazz club in Salem, Oregon, called Christo’s, a restaurant and lounge. They recently announced that with the closure of Jimmy Mak’s in Portland, “We have been asked to host, for a continual run of second Saturdays, the Mel Brown Septet.”

The next engagement in the run will be on May 13th at 8:30 pm. Unless they have knocked down some walls, it is a small space (maybe about 44 can be shoe-horned in), so reservations are a must (503-371-2892, but don’t call until after 5 pm, as they are all in the kitchen.) Musicians listed are Brown, drums; Gordon Lee, piano; Tim Gilson, bass; Renato Caranto, tenor sax; John Nastos, alto sax; Derek Sims, trumpet; and Stan Goetz. On Thursday, May 4th, the club will have trumpeter Dmitri Matheny’s group and further into the month a trad jazz group on the 13th; Chris Brown Quartet on the 20th. These all start at 7 pm, two sets that are usually over around 9:30. I have no idea how they have been are able to do this for the past several years. Most shows sell out.

Thanks to Mr. Hill for his alert.

Mel Brown’s groups of various sizes were mainstays at Jimmy Mak’s for years. It’s good to know that he’ll be in action in Salem, an hour south of Portland on Interstate 5. From one of Brown’s gigs at Mak’s in 2009, here is his septet with Gordon Lee, piano; Derek Sims, trumpet; Renato Caranto, tenor saxophone; Warren Rand, alto sax; Andre St. James, bass; Stan Bock, trombone; and guest trumpeter Farnell Newton, who has the first solo on a blues that may or may not have a title.

The Monday concert that paid tribute to the 2017 National Endowment For The Arts Jazz Masters is now online, all three hours of it. In addition to new Jazz Masters Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ira Gitler, Dave Holland, Dick Hyman and Dr. Lonnie Smith, the three-hour concert includes performances by a variety of other prominent artists. The link makes it possible to fast-forward and search. Thanks to the NEA’s Elizabeth Auclair for sending it. To watch and listen to the concert, click here.

At the invitation of the Rifftides staff, reader Michael Phillips sent a report about the NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert last night at the Kennedy Center. Mr. Philips (pictured left) lives near Washington, DC. He  is a clean-energy consultant who “used to play guitar in swing and jump blues bands” and now co-hosts a jazz radio show.

By Michael Philips

In person, the music was electrifying. In a tribute to Dick Hyman, his long-time friend, semi-protégé and distant cousin Bill Charlap joined with Aaron Diehl for a medley on twin grand pianos. They started playfully with a few measures of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” then went through a series of increasingly complex Hyman tunes. The pianists played overlapping harmonies and rhythms, and when the baton was passed each sat silently while the other soloed.

Another highlight was the ensemble playing in tribute to Dave Holland. For a few minutes, the rest of the band stopped as trombonist Robin Eubanks and saxophonist Chris Potter went off on an extended mutual solo. Partly because of his work with Pat Metheny and his many Down Beat awards, Potter is already well known among jazz fans. Eubanks showed that he deserves as much attention as his guitarist brother Kevin and his late uncle, pianist Ray Bryant.

A poignant moment came in the tribute to Dr. Lonnie Smith when the blind 16-year-old organist Matthew Whitaker, playing the Hammond B-3, led a quartet through Jimmy Smith’s “Mellow Mood .“ The piece also featured a superb solo by guitarist Mike Moreno.

The pit band was the talented all-female 15-piece Diva Jazz Orchestra led by Sherrie Maracle. They did a yeoman’s job backing alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and pianist Dan Tepfer during their tribute to jazz writer Ira Gitler, and in accompanying singer Dianne Reeves and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera as they honored brand new Jazz Master Dee Dee Bridgewater.

During a listening session at NPR headquarters the day before the NEA concert, bassist Dave Holland recounted a time in 1968 when he was playing at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London. During a break, his friend Philly Joe Jones told him that Miles Davis was in the audience and wanted him to join Miles’ band. Holland said he thought Jones was pulling his leg, but Jones insisted that he should talk to Miles during the next break. At the break, Holland looked for Davis but was told he had gone back to his hotel. The next morning, he waited until a respectable hour, then called the hotel, only to be told that Miles had checked out and gone to the airport. Holland called Philly Joe and asked him what he should do. Jones said to hang tight, that he’d hear from Miles.

A week went by, then another week. Three weeks later on a Tuesday at three o’clock in the morning Holland got a call. It was from Miles’ manager asking if he can make a gig with Davis in New York on Friday. Of course Holland said yes, then raced around London getting a visa and a plane ticket and was on the first flight he could arrange. All the while, he was listening to Miles’ music, but didn’t really know what to expect at the gig. He arrived in New York the afternoon before the date and went to Herbie Hankcock’s house. Herbie went over the changes of some tunes with him, but Holland showed up for the gig with minimal preparation. Miles appeared at the last minute, counted off the first tune and they were off and running.

Holland stayed with the Davis band for two years.

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(Michael Phillips’ radio program In the Jazz Kitchen airs Thursdays from 9 to 11pm Eastern time on the non-profit, community-based station WOWD-FM 94.3. It streams live at takomaradio.org.)

Funding for the arts in The United States may be eliminated or drastically reduced if the Trump administration has its way, but an established arts showcase will be presented this evening, we hope not for the last time. The 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters will be honored at the John F. Kennedy Center Washington, DC. They are pictured above. Here are the NEA’s descriptions:

Dee Dee Bridgewater, vocalist, producer, broadcaster
Ira Gitler, author, editor, producer, educator
Dave Holland, bassist, cellist, composer, bandleader
Dick Hyman, keyboardist, composer, arranger
Dr. Lonnie Smith, organist, composer

All but  Gitler, who is ailing, will be present and are expected to speak. Gitler’s son Fitz will represent him. At 7:30 p.m. Eastern time, the NEA will stream the event live on its website. National Public Radio will carry it at NPR.org/Music

From the NEA announcement:

The concert will include performances by NEA Jazz Masters Paquito D’Rivera and Lee Konitz, as well as Bill Charlap, Theo Croker, Aaron Diehl, Robin Eubanks, James Genus, Donald Harrison, Booker T. Jones, Sherrie Maricle and the Diva Jazz Orchestra, Peter Martin, Mike Moreno, China Moses, Steve Nelson, Kassa Overall, Chris Potter, Dianne Reeves, Nate Smith, Dan Tepfer, and Matthew Whitaker.

For further information, see the NEA site. If Rifftides readers watch or listen to the presentation, please jot a note or two and let us know your impressions by way of the comment function below.

The award-winning broadcaster Jim Wilke is presenting two groups on his Jazz Northwest program Sunday afternoon. He recorded them at last summer’s Centrum Port Townsend Jazz Festival on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Here is Jim’s illustrated description of the proceedings.

Highlights from concerts by The Jeff Hamilton Trio with organist Akiko Tsuruga and guitarist Graham Dechter, and the grand finale with an all star septet including Terell Stafford, Sean Jones, Grace Kelly, Wycliffe Gordon, Taylor Eigsti, John Clayton and Matt Wilson will be the final offerings from last July’s Jazz Port Townsend. The music includes blues, standards and bop played by a cross-section of the best players at the Festival who also serve as faculty for the weeklong Jazz Workshop that precedes it.

The concerts were recorded for Jazz Northwest in McCurdy Pavilion at Fort Worden, part of a 30 year tradition of broadcasts from the Festival. Jazz Northwest airs every Sunday at 2 PM PDT on 88.5 KNKX and on the web at knkx.org. The program is recorded and produced by host Jim Wilke exclusively for KNKX-FM. Following the broadcast, programs are archived and may be streamed at jazznw.org

If you’re not familiar with Akiki Tsuraga at the organ, here’s your chance, a video of her with Lou Donaldson’s quartet.  This performance may make you eager to hear her on Sunday with Jeff Hamilton on Wilke’s show.

Rifftides is on the back burner for a few days. The proprietor is immersed in annotating an extensive project involving Art Pepper’s early recordings for the Contemporary label. Details will follow—eventually. For now, here’s the alto saxophonist from a 1960 session. Pepper (1925-1982) once said that his playing on this version of “Autumn Leaves” was “an example of me at my best.”

The Rifftides staff almost let March 26 go by without acknowledging that this is James Moody’s birthday. The master of several saxophones and the flute was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. At 21, following his tour with the US Air Force, Moody joined Dizzy Gillespie’s trailblazing 1946 big band. In the late forties, with a group of Swedish all-stars, he recorded “I’m In The Mood For Love.” His solo on the single became a hit record in Sweden, then in the United States, with a lyric added by King Pleasure, as “Moody’s Mood For Love.” Throughout his career Moody was one of Gillespie’s closest colleagues, co-starring in the trumpeter’s quintet in several of its incarnations and frequently put together with Gillespie in all-star groups. Here, videotaped for a PBS Soundstage broadcast in 1975, we briefly see Gillespie after he has announced Moody. We see and hear Moody; Al Haig, piano; Ray Brown, bass; and Kenny Clarke, drums—a convocation of bebop giants. The video is slightly fuzzy. The sound is not.

You must have been wondering—haven’t we all?—what happened to Mr. P.C.’s Guide To Jazz Etiquette And Bandstand Decorum. The jazz world’s indispensible source of advice has become harder to find, but not impossible. His latest installment has to do with CDs, their ubiquity or the lack of it, and how to properly dispose of one if it should happen to inadvertently make its way into your horn case or backpack. To read the column, go here, and make note of the web address for future reference.

This evening, pianists Roger Kellaway (US) and Peter Beets (Netherlands) are collaborating at New York City’s Sheen Center. It’s part of the Jazz On Bleecker Street series. Their concert is scheduled to include a medley of pieces written by the British nobleman Paul McCartney.

Here is an earlier encounter of the pianists playing works by McCartney at a concert with the Asheville, North Carolina, Symphony. Kellaway is on the left of your screen, Beets on the right. The drummer is Ron Krasinski, the bassist Ike Harris. To be certain that you know the names of a couple of the songs, Kellaway announces them, emphatically.

Cuneiform is an independent label recording music that is out of the mainstream. The Claudia Quartet, Wadada Leo Smith and Thinking Plague are on the Cuneiform roster, and it has groups with even wider orbits—Bent Knee from Boston, for instance, the Norwegian quintet I.P.A., the British jazz-punk rock group called Led Bib, and Naima, a trio from Spain. That list constitutes a thin sampling of Cuneiform talent. The history of the label’s name goes back 5,500 years or more. Curious about how it was chosen, I dropped a line to Joyce, the label’s director of publicity and information, and asked, “Are you archeologists?” Here is some of her answer.

I’m actually an art historian by academic training, BA + MA (not an archeologist, a modernist). I’m not the one who came up with the name. Cuneiform’s owner and founder, Steve Feigenbaum, did. He wanted a different, distinctive name. We both admired ancient Middle Eastern art. Cuneiform is one of the earliest systems of writing, of recording information. The Sumerians developed it in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. It was a radical innovation in the ancient world. Unlike pictorial languages, it was phonetic and semantic and thus capable of expressing abstract concepts. Music is recorded information, and we wanted our label to record radically innovative music. So, naming the label after cuneiform seemed fitting.

It broke my heart that most people did not know what the word cuneiform was about—what it referred to—until Iraq was in the news following the US invasion in 2003.

In the course of our correspondence, I learned that Joyce has been Mrs. Steve Feigenbaum since 1985. She left her work with the federal government in 1993 to join Cuneiform and help her husband operate the label. Here we see the Feigenbaums on a visit to the painter Salvador Dali’s house in Portlligat / Cadaques, Spain. Their escort is unidentified.

Among Cuneiform’s recent releases is Wadada Leo Smith’s America’s National Parks. Smith is the trumpeter, with Anthony Davis, piano; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums; and Ashley Walters, cello. This is Smith’s “Yellowstone.”

In the northern hemisphere, it is the first day of spring. In our corner of the Pacific Northwest, the season dawned grey, cloudy and looking as if any minute the sky might open up with rain rather than sunshine. We’re compensating with a photograph that expresses hope. Coming out of a relentlessly snowy winter around here, spring is in our hearts, if not in our weather forecast.

I awakened with the back of my mind repeating the melody of a classic 1943 Jimmy Van Heusen-Johnny Burke song. Let’s listen to two versions of “Suddenly It’s Spring.” The first is by Frank Sinatra from an album evidently made up of previously unissued recordings. Unfortunately, the sound remastering fails to match the quality of Sinatra’s singing, but he captures the song’s essence.

At the Jazz At Porquerolles Festival on the French Riviera in 2011, Charles Lloyd and his remarkable quartet of the period turned their attention to one of Brian Wilson’s songs. Wilson first recorded the piece as a single in 1966 and later used it in the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds.

Lloyd toured with the Beach Boys in the 1970s and heard the song as a beautiful melody harboring harmonic possibilities. For more than three minutes at the opening of the Porquelles version, he is absorbed in pianist Jason Moran’s introduction. Then he joins Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland to create a series of abstractions. Following a Moran solo, Lloyd closes with one of his celebrated studies in peacefulness before Rogers bows his way toward a conclusion as the video fades.

McGhee, one of the essential bop trumpeters, plays “Lover Man,” accompanied by Richard Davis, bass; Ted Dunbar, guitar; and Roy Haynes, drums; at Jack Kleinsinger’s “Highlights In Jazz” tribute to Charlie Parker in April, 1973, in New York. McGhee makes the introduction.

Bob Porter, Soul Jazz: Jazz In The Black Community, 1945-1975, Xlibris

Sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics. Bob Porter’s new book guides you there. For decades, Porter has disseminated the jazz basics by way of records he has produced, liner notes he has written, and radio programs he has hosted. He is active today on WBGO, a leading jazz station. Among the many artists he has brought to public attention are Gene Ammons, Hank Crawford, Jimmy McGriff, Horace Silver, Harold Mabern, David “Fathead” Newman and Houston Person. An example from among the extensive list of Porter’s productions is the 1969 Person album Goodness, which included the soul hit, “Jamilah.” (You can listen to “Jamilah” here). Porter writes clearly and comprehensively, incorporating his vast knowledge of leading soul jazz musicians and personal experience with them.

Tad Hershorn of the Institute Of Jazz Studies notifies us that IJS will hold a two-day symposium March 24 and 25 to celebrate the life and 100th anniversary of the birth of Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996). Hershorn will be among those honoring Ms. Fitzgerald along with longtime IJS leader Dan Morgenstern and a contingent of other experts on her life and art.

Speakers will include historians and journalists Lewis Porter, Phil Schaap and Will Friedwald. Biographer Judith Tick will discuss her Fitzgerald book due for publication next year. Pianists Mike Wofford and Richard Wyands will remember their years accompanying Ms. Fitzgerald and incorporate demonstrations of their techniques. Vocalist Carrie Jackson will also perform. The event will be free, but registration is required. For full details, go here.

For Ella in performance, stay right where you are and click on the arrow. YouTube says this masterwork has had 2,992,718 viewers. Who knows, you may be number 3,000,000.