The traditional record industry is imploding. It is impossible to say what will emerge from the turbulence. Some analysts of the music business are predicting that the compact disc will quickly go the way of the LP, the cassette, the eight-track tape, the 45, the 78 and the cylinder. They say it’s going to be an iPod world, an MP3 world. How long will technology allow those new means of music delivery to survive? Are you ready for a digital implant in your brain?

In the meantime, CDs proliferate because they’re so easy, so cheap, to make. The expense and sheer complexity of gettting music from an instrument or a voice into a microphone and ultimately onto a record used to require the resources of a company. Digital technology, the internet and distribution by downloading make it possible for anyone who can raise a few thousand dollars to be a record label. One of the immediate by-products of the transition is that recording “artists” (ahem) are materializing at an incredible rate. Who knew that there were so many jazz singers? The maturing and development of singers once took place through the demanding process of experience, during which those with the goods survived and the wannabees, for the most part, didn’t. Now the wannabees bypass experience and put out CDs on their own labels. Some of those recordings are awful, most merely boring. That is why it was welcome to receive the recent release—in one fell swoop—of nine CDs by survivors of a more rigorous system. These albums from EMI were issued in the 1950s and 1960s on the Capitol, Pacific Jazz and Roulette labels. Some of the singers were more accomplished than others, but all are at or near their best in this series, and it may be instructive for some of the wannabees to study them. One clue to what they might listen for: in nearly every case, the performances are more about the song than the singer.

Sarah Vaughan, Sarah + 2 (Roulette). Vaughan recorded two indispensable albums with only bass and guitar, this one and the earlier After Hours, also for Roulette. Here, the bassist is Joe Comfort, the guitarist Barney Kessel, who may have been her ideal accompanist. In this minimal setting, Sarah powered down and avoided the excesses that sometimes marred her work when she was surrounded by massed strings, reeds and brass. Everything that made her a phenomenon of twentieth century art is in balance–musicianship, elegance, judgment, intonation, control, vocal quality and that astonishing range. If you need to know why an opera star like Renee Fleming worships Vaughan, consult this CD.

June Christy, The Intimate Miss Christy (Capitol). Christy’s strength was her story-telling. Her famously unstable intonation occasionally wanders here, but it is perfect as she gets to the hearts of “The More I See You” and “Don’t Explain.” Her “Misty” is the best I’ve ever heard (yes, I know about Sarah Vaughan’s). Christy should have recorded with small groups more often. Her compatability with guitarist Al Viola is a large reason for the success of this venture.

Sue Raney, All By Myself (Capitol). There’s a hint of Christy in some of this early work by the sublime Raney, but her flawless intonation, time and phrasing are her own. The zest she brings to “Some of These Days” and the longing to “Maybe You’ll Be There,” define those songs. This was her second album for Capitol, made when she was twenty-three. It disappeared for decades. It’s good to have it back.

Chris Connor, At The Village Gate (Roulette). Because she succeeded Christy in Stan Kenton’s band, was also blonde and had a husky quality to her voice, Connor was at first presumed to be a Christy imitator. She never was. In this club date long after her Kenton years, Connor was a powerhouse, nailing every song, creating excitement that rarely surfaced in her better known albums. This is a revelation.

Joe Williams, A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry (Roulette). This was the first of Williams’s great ballad albums, the one that disclosed him as more than a magnificent blues singer. In a class with Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra as a balladeer, Williams finds the soul and meaning of a dozen songs. He and the incomparable arranger Jimmy Mundy include the seldom-heard verses of several of the pieces. Still with Count Basie when this was recorded, Williams was at the apex of his ability.

Irene Kral, The Band and I (Capitol). Nearly thirty years after her death, a substantial cadre of afficianados maintains that Kral was the best female jazz singer of them all. This is the record that made her a darling of musicians and sophisticated listeners. Never interested in scatting, Kral used taste, rhythmic assurance and intelligent interpretation to establish jazz authority. The band was Herb Pomeroy’s. This album was the only time they and Kral worked together. They created a classic.

Jon Hendricks, A Good Git-Together (Pacific Jazz). Hendricks does scat. He knows what chords are made of and takes musicianly advantage of that knowledge. Of the albums he recorded apart from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross during that group’s primacy, this is the most joyous. No doubt his elation had something to do with the company he kept in the studio. His sidemen included Wes, Buddy and Monk Montgomery; Nat and Cannonball Adderley and Pony Poindexter.

Dakota Staton, Dynamic! (Capitol). Staton could be dynamic, all right, earning that exclamation point in the title. She could also go into a cloying sex kitten mode, saccharine to the point of embarrassment. When she concentrated on serving the song, she was often splendid, as she is here on “They All Laughed,” “Cherokee” and “I’ll Remember April.” Among the supporting cast, Harry Edison’s trumpet is obvious, but who are the terrific bassist and the lightning-fast trombonist? The reissue producers might have consulted the original session sheets and listed the musicians for all the CDs in this series.

Julie London, Around Midnight (Capitol). London’s treatments of “Misty,” “‘Round Midnight” and “Don’t Smoke in Bed” are among her best performances. Now and then she glides in and out of tune on a held note, but on balance this may be her finest album. London’s strengths were a bewitching intimacy and her believable connection to lyrics. This is a ballad collection relieved by “You and the Night and the Music” and “But Not For Me” well arranged by Dick Reynolds at medium tempos. London does an effective cover of Christy’s “Something Cool,” despite the distraction of a vocal group behind her chanting “something cool, something cool, something cool.”

For the record, here’s the probable personnel of the band that night as best I can remember:
Earl Gardner, Joe Mosello, Simo Salminen, John Marshall, trumpets; John Mosca, Lee Robertson, trombones; Douglas Purviance, Earl McIntyre, bass trombones; Stephanie Fauber, French horn; Dick Oatts, Kenny Garrett, alto saxophones; Bob Mintzer, Rich Perry, tenor saxophones; Gary Pribeck, baritone saxophone; Jim McNeely, piano; Marc Johnson, bass; Mel Lewis, drums; Miles Davis, guest solo trumpet.

In 1997, I wrote briefly about that night in the preface to A Miles Davis Reader, which I edited for the Smithsonian Institution Press:

“I had only one brief contact with Miles Davis…. In the spring of 1981 Davis was preparing to emerge from a nearly six-year retirement, and he spent several consecutive Monday nights visiting the Village Vanguard in New York and listening to Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra. During the last of those visits (at which, to my good fortune, I was present), Lewis persuaded Davis to sit in with the band. Lewis kicked off one of his orchestra’s staples, Thad Jones’s “The Second Race,” and Davis, borrowing in succession all four trumpets from the band’s trumpet section, played an extended blues solo to the delight of everyone in the club. Since he was playing borrowed horns and was still getting his chops back after years of inactivity, Davis sounded rusty, but what he played could have come only from him.

“During the next break, I was sitting at a table with one of the band’s trumpeters, Joe Mosello. Suddenly, Davis approached our table and crouched down next to us. He placed his left hand on my right knee, looked straight at Mosello, and said in his famous raspy voice, ‘You know, you shouldn’t drink beer on the gig. It dries you out.’

He was right.”

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray”—Lord Byron

For fifty years, Columbia let Flute Fever languish unissued in its vaults. Presumably with Columbia’s approval, In 2013, a company called International Phonograph, Inc. remastered it with high quality sound and reissued the album on CD. Steig and Zeitlin went on to extensive achievement, but Flute Fever remains a high point in their discographies.

For a comprehensive summary of Jeremy Steig’s career, see his obituary by Peter Keepnews in The New York Times.

Deborah Hendrick read the comment about Bix Beiderbecke having been a cornetist, not a trumpeter, and asks:

As part of my continuing education, why would a musician choose a trumpet over a cornet, or the other way around?

Experts on brass instruments have written volumes on that question. Here is my non-voluminous answer.

The trumpet’s tubing is elongated and relatively straight until it reaches the flare of the bell. That gives the instrument volume and brilliance. The cornet’s tubing is tightly wound compared to that of the trumpet, resulting in more air resistance when the player blows into the horn. Its tubing is conical, growing bigger around as it approaches the bell. Taken together, those two factors give the cornet a mellower, softer sound than the trumpet’s. Trumpets predominate these days in orchestras and bands, but through the last half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the cornet was king. It was developed by the Frenchman J.B. Arban, who literally wrote the book on how to play it. Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method is still the cornetist’s, and trumpeter’s, bible.

John Philip Sousa and Herbert L. Clarke, disciples of Arban, were virtuoso cornetists who led famous brass bands and further influenced the popularity of the instrument. When jazz came along, cornet was the default lead brass instrument in the early New Orleans bands, as it was in Chicago and New York in the 1920s and into the thirties. Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke were cornetists. My guess is that Armstrong switched to trumpet because when he organized his big band around 1930, he wanted to project more, but his great early recordings were on cornet. Beiderbecke, to my knowledge, played cornet exclusively. Many great jazz players thought of as trumpeters were, in fact, cornetists, among them Bobby Hackett, Rex Stewart, Ruby Braff, Jimmy McPartland, Wild Bill Davison, Nat Adderley and, often, Thad Jones. They preferred the cornet’s fluency and intimacy. Few modern trumpet players also play the cornet, but many double on flugelhorn, which can achieve similar, but not identical, mellowness. Committed cornetists are passionate in their love for the instrument, witness this quote from a player named Mike Trager.

I equate my cornet with a good-natured golden retriever and my trumpet with a vicious Doberman pinscher.

Left to right, you see flugelhorn, trumpet, cornet and piccolo trumpet and, in front, assorted mutes. The flugelhorn and the piccolo trumpet here are the four-valve variety. You know what I say about that? It’s hard enough to play three valves. I’ll leave well enough alone. But I wish I had my old cornet back. Maybe I’ll prowl the pawn shops.

_________________________________________________________________

So, you may ask in 2016, how about a cornet demonstration? Well, of course. Here’s one by a master, Warren Vache, at the 2013 Ancona Jazz Festival in Italy, with pianist Paolo Alderighi. They play Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing” and “Prelude to a Kiss.” Their encore is one chorus of Sammy Fain’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Underground has been reissued on CD with three alternate takes that were not on the original LP.

To see the Mosaic Jazz Gazette, go here.

To learn about The Baroness, see this Rifftides post from 10 years ago.

Sometimes the excitement is in the layer of interplay between Curt Bley’s bass and Quin Kirchner’s drums, as in the piece named for one of Clearfield’s heroes, the guitarist Ralph Towner of the band Oregon. In other tracks, the surprise sneaks up on the listener. “The Antidote” is a calm solo piano piece until Bley and Kirchner inject it with a welling rhythm. In the title track, Clearfield (pictured) plays piano and electric organ simultaneously, driven by Kirchner’s insistent 4/4 beat of a stick on a snare drum. As the piece closes, Clearfield melds back into keyboard serenity that contrasts with the rhythm that yields ever so slightly. In a tune with the picaresque title “Pierce is Kind of a Weird Name for a Street,” the trio breaks up the time without losing the swing; a neat trick.

Here is Clearfield in his pre-leader days with bassist Matt Ulery’s band called Loom as they visited Washington, DC in 2013 and played a National Public Radio Tiny Desk Concert. The band is Ulery, bass; Clearfield, keyboards and accordion; Marquis Hill, trumpet; Geof Bradfield, bass clarinet; and Joe Dietemyer, drums. The compositions, both by Ulery, are “Coriander” and “My Favorite Stranger.”

Less than a year later, at age 51, Paul Desmond was gone.

To millions of listeners, no instance of Davis’s influence is more familiar than his 1959 recording Kind Of Blue. It is often described as the best-selling of all jazz albums. On this landmark Davis birthday, here is “So What,” with the sextet that also included John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone; Bill Evans, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Jimmy Cobb, drums.