The problems that took the Rifftides computer out of action a few days ago were resolved when I replaced it with a newer model. Then, attempts to post new items derailed in an onslaught of password problems involving the publishing platform. That has been fixed, too——I think. Perhaps any computer owner will understand my lingering skepticism.

So: onward.

Had it been possible to post yesterday, I would have wished you a happy Halloween and shown you the official 2015 Rifftides Jack O’lantern. Here it is, a day late, nestled in a bed of fallen maple leaves on the porch.

We had 67 trick-or-treaters last night, including a repulsive monster dripping blood and an enchanting princess who touched us on the shoulder with her wand.

News Item: the pianist Jessica Williams has recovered from the surgery that impeded her career for a time. She is preparing for a new phase. The word is that she is likely to begin rehearsing a group incorporating strings. From her website, a photo taken by her husband during a shopping expedition accompanies her declaration that she has “improved posture and almost no trace of scoliosis or spinal deformity after my three-segment lumbar back surgery.” That would seem to suggest that her left hand may be as formidable as ever. See and hear, as an example, what she did with it did a few years ago in a performance of “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”

Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dee Dee’s Feathers (Okeh)

Dee Dee Bridgewater is strong medicine, fully a match for the powerful New Orleans repertoire she performs here. Slinking and seducing her way through Harry Connick, Jr.’s “One Fine Thing,” finding joy and irony in “Saint James Infirmary,” riding the parade beat in “Dee Dee’s Feathers,” challenging Irvin Mayfield’s wa-wa trumpet “wa” for “wa” and scream for scream in Hoagy Carmichael’s “New Orleans,” Bridgewater is a force as primal as a Gulf hurricane.

Much of the music centers on power and ruggedness, but she brings her musicality to every track, singing impeccably in tune and with flawless time even when pushing the rhythm envelope. If “Congo Square,” “Whoopin’ Blues” and Dr. John’s “Big Chief” are contrivances for summoning up the New Orleans party atmosphere, they are contrivances that work. Mayfield’s “C’est Ici Que Je T’aime,” Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” and Bob Thiele’s “What A Wonderful World” dial back the tempo without slacking the energy.

Having lived in New Orleans for eight years, I know what it means to miss it. Bridgewater’s and Mayfield’s passionate version of “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” doesn’t make missing it any easier.

This may come a tad late as news but not too late—I trust—for enjoyment. Last spring, Sullivan Fortner won the Cole Porter Fellow In Jazz award of the American Pianists Association. Fortner is a 28-year-old New Orleanian who attracted favorable notice as the pianist in trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s quintet and for his work with other jazz artists including Christian Scott and Stefon Harris. The award and its $100,000 prize came in competition with four other rising pianists, Christian Sands, Zach Lapidus, Emmet Cohen and Kris Bowers. The judges were pianists Bill Charlap, Billy Childs, Amina Figarova and Edward Simon. Executive Al Pryor of Mack Avenue Records was also on the panel.

Video from the March competition in Indianapolis, Indiana, shows us the skill and adaptability that the judges saw and heard in Fortner’s round of the finals. First, he accompanied singer Dianne Reeves. Then, backed by the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, he played Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.”

At last report, Sullivan Fortner was back on the road, touring with Roy Hargrove.

Today was chock-full of interviewing, transcribing, researching and, in general, preparing to write liner notes for a new Don Friedman trio album. The research included diving into books, rummaging through the web for additional information and—best of all—listening to Friedman play the piano and hearing some of the music that has influenced him over the years. Among the listening was the Don Friedman Project at the 2005 Jazz Baltica Festival on Germany’s Baltic seacoast. The project included the late guitarist Jim Hall, bassist George Mraz and drummer Lewis Nash. Despite what the onscreen title says at 00:27, the piece in this rare video is “How Deep is the Ocean?”

In my research for the Friedman notes, I thought that I would sample a video of Leonard Bernstein playing and conducting Maurice Ravel’s seminal Piano Concerto in G-Major, which inspired one of the pieces in the forthcoming Fresh Sound album. Sampling wasn’t good enough. I ended up watching and listening to all three movements of a piece whose secrets I thought I knew—until I was mesmerized by what Bernstein did with it. If you can spare 24 minutes, go here. You, too, may be mesmerized. YouTube doesn’t identify the orchestra. It does not seem to be the New York Philharmonic.

The nearly infinite flexibility of English makes the language universally useful and often confusing. Seeing the word for the first time, who would know how to pronounce “Arkansas?” Imagine that you had never heard “colonel,” “sword” or “Wednesday.” How would you say them? The peculiarities of English were challenging enough before computers. The digital revolution often explodes conventional usage.

In the pre-digital age, “nesting” might have had to do with birds or with human cohabitation, not HTML technique. “Hypertext” might have described a book by a writer high on amphetamines. “OOP” was a comic strip caveman; now, it’s object-oriented programming. “Schema,” the old Greek word adapted to English, used to refer to a plan or scheme. Now, it’s an XML document.

No piece of digital jargon is more common or less logical than “email.” When most written correspondence was through the post office, we sent a letter, not a “mail.” Yet, in the language of digital communication, we send “an email.” We email each other, making the noun a verb. Logically, it should be an email message or, simply, a message. But, what does logic have to do with how language changes? Maybe it’s best just to sit back and be amazed, or amused, at the way it evolves.

On Yahoo’s Dave Brubeck listserve, John Bolger called attention to an unsual version of Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo ala Turk.” It is by the Dutch ensemble Fuse—five string players and a percussionist. According to the group’s website, like many young bands today they play in a variety of genres including pop, rock, classical and jazz. Among composers whose works they have recently performed are Brubeck, Bartok and Britney Spears. Here’s the Brubeck piece.

Fuse is Mascha Van Nieuwkerk, cello; Adriaan Breunis, viola; Emma van der Shale and Julia Philippens, violin; and Tobias Nijboer, bass. Ms. Philippens soloed on “Blue Rondo.” For more information, see their website.

Have a good weekend.

Last weekend, pianist Bill Mays wrapped up a tour of the west with his Inventions Trio, which includes trumpeter and flugelhornist Marvin Stamm and cellist Alisa Horn. Longtime collaborators in several projects, Mays and Stamm also played a duo concert in The Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz series.

Sunday afternoon, segments of the concert will be broadcast and streamed on Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest. From Mr. Wilke’s announcement:

Describing what they do as “a musical conversation” the longtime friends and musical partners eschew long solos in favor of frequent exchanges of melody and improvisation. Their concert at SAM included original compositions, standards and jazz classics. Highlights from the concert will air on Jazz Northwest, on 88.5 KPLU on Sunday, October 18 at 2 PM Pacific.

Across the mountains from Seattle, The Inventions Trio played a Friday night concert at TheSeasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington. The next evening, Bill played and I narrated our History of Jazz Piano. We may do it next year at a European festival. Negotiations are in progress.

From a few years ago, here are Stamm and Mays with guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Ed Soph. Stamm wrote “Samba du Nancy” with Mrs. Stamm in mind. The video is slightly out of focus. The music is not.

This seems to be the season for a new round of films based, more or less, on the lives of jazz trumpet players. See the October 11 Rifftides post about Don Cheadle as Miles Davis. The latest entry in the category is Born To Be Blue, which was screened yesterday and today in special presentations at the Toronto Film Festival. Ethan Hawke plays Chet Baker or—as Variety’s Andrew Barker writes in his review—

“a character who happens to share a name and a significant number of biographical similarities with Chet Baker, taking the legendary West Coast jazz musician’s life as though it were merely a chord chart from which to launch an improvised set of new melodies.”

In an earlier era, cornetists Bix Beiderbecke (Young Man With a Horn, 1950) and Red Nichols (The Five Pennies, 1959) were honored, if that’s the appropriate term, with portrayals that also altered biographical facts to satisfy artistic license. In this teaser scene, Hawke as Baker plays for a couple of record industry suits.

Hawke reportedly spent six months learning to play the trumpet as he prepared for the role. Pre-release publicity for the movie does not say who plays in that scene but, clearly, the sound track is dubbed from the only recording I know in which Baker plays “Over The Rainbow.” It picks up on the second eight bars of his solo.

Chet Baker in Rome in 1962 with Amadeo Tomassi, piano; Benoit Quersin, bass; and Daniel Humair, drums, from Chet Is Back!. The album also has Baker with two formidable Belgians, tenor saxophonist Bobby Jaspar and guitarist René Thomas, and on four tracks with the film composer Ennio Morricone and his orchestra.

Returning from a weekend reunion of classmates, I drove through the Cascade Mountains as the deciduous trees on Blewett Pass were beginning their glorious fall display…

…which inspired thoughts of this:

Out of the mountains, headed east on a back road, I listened to Scott Robinson’s and Julian Thayer’s new duo album on Robinson’s ScienSonic Laboratories label. The CD’s title is ? To call Robinson a multi-instrumentalist is to shortchange him. He is a kaleido-instrumentalist. On ?, he plays low on the contrabass sarrusophone, high on the clarinet, and between on echo cornet, C-melody saxophone, theremin, junk banjo and slide saxophone, to mention a sampling of his arsenal. Altogether, Thayer and Robinson play at least three dozen instruments. As if it had been scripted, just as I drove through a wind farm Robinson played a tenor saxophone solo—quiet, contemplative—with Thayer’s bass accompaniment on a piece called “I Wonder.” It matched the space-age eeriness of the scene.

For all of their quick instrumental changes and schtick that sometimes approaches vaudeville but does not cross into it, the two produce serious music that calls for serious listening.

Robinson’s previous Sciensonic album, Mission In Space, features a five-piece band that he calls a spacetette. Bassist Pat O’Leary and percussionist Kevin Norton back Robinson and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who has heavy credentials in bebop and free jazz. For the recording, the veteran bassist Henry Grimes joined the band. Robinson confines himself to 15 instruments, among them the sonic laser actuator and the photo-optic theremin. Never fear, he also plays tenor sax, an instrument that has brought him increasing attention. The record opens with all members playing space sound tubes and coming gradually closer. The CD illustrations do not show us a space sound tube. It may be best to imagine one, as it is best not to attempt to classify this intriguing music.

The Seasons performance hall in Yakima, Washington, kicked off its new jazz series last night with drummer Louis Hayes and his Cannonball Adderley Legacy band. The Hayes quintet is dedicated to interpreting the music of Adderley (1928-1975 ) and his cornetist brother Nat (1931-2000).

Alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and pianist Rick Germanson have been with Hayes for years. At The Seasons, the young Seattle bassist Michael Glynn joined on short notice, demonstrating an understanding of the repertoire and the spirit of the band.

Hayes recently suffered a hip fracture in a parking lot fall from the group’s van during their tour of the Pacific Northwest. In Yakima, once he moved from a wheel chair to the drum stool, there was no indication that the accident affected his playing. He swings hard, listens closely to his soloists and tailors his accompaniments to their inventions and moods. From the opening “Jeannine,” Hayes demonstrated firm management of the band from the drum set—and a quiet personality; he leaves announcements to Herring. Hayes solos infrequently. When he cut loose at length last night, as on the Quincy Jones piece “Jessica’s Day,” he elevated the already considerable level of excitement. Introducing Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” Herring went to humorous lengths to tell the audience how sick of it he became after playing the song every night for years in Nat’s band. Then he soloed on it as if discovering it. Herring’s most Cannonball-like work of the night came on “Autumn Leaves.” On the same piece, Pelt played into a Harmon mute and constructed a solo that made ingenious use of repeated phrases. Thirteen years after his debut as a young lion influenced by Freddie Hubbard, Pelt is one of the most personal and identifiable of the trumpeters of his generation who came to prominence early in the century. In Germanson’s feature, Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” the pianist was both soft and rhapsodic, with passages of block chords as well as delicate phrases in the upper register.

There is no video of last night’s performance. Corey Weeds to the rescue. Here is the band with bassist Dezron Douglas in an earlier appearance at Weeds’ club, The Cellar, in Vancouver, BC. They play a staple of the Adderley book, Eddie Vinson’s “Arriving Soon.”

The Seasons dropped most jazz and classical music for a few years in favor of other genres. New concert series in both fields are hopeful signs for the future of a hall that is an acoustic marvel.