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Serious bicycling has resumed more than three months after I made a dumb move that gave me an intimate introduction to a few square feet of asphalt. I forgot what I had known since I was 10 years old; when you are on a thin-tired bike, cross trolley tracks only at a 90-degree angle. Damage to the bicycle was minor. All of my parts are back to full function, and I’m once again enjoying the scenery.

This was along the Yakima River, which is running low because the Cascade Mountains had so little snow last winter. Across the river, you can see in the brown hills the result of the drought that has made most of the western U.S. prone to massive forest and range fires. We’ll hope that autumn brings plenty of moisture, and winter a huge snow pack in the mountains. Here’s early evidence that autumn is on the way.

What? You thought I’d miss an excuse to play this?

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Jim Wilke continues to feature on his Jazz Northwest music he recorded at this summer’s Centrum Port Townsend Jazz Festival. Here is his announcement about tomorrow’s program.

Each Sunday, Jazz Northwest presents music by resident and visiting musicians in the Pacific Northwest. This week’s show includes Triology from Vancouver BC, Wayne Horvitz and the Royal Room Music Collective Ensemble, Dave Frishberg from Portland, and New York based saxophonist Steve Wilson playing in downtown Port Townsend during the jazz festival in July. Jazz Northwest airs Sundays at 2 PM on 88.5 KPLU and streams at kplu.org (Photo of Steve Wilson by Jim Levitt)

 

 

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Bill Evans died 35 years ago today at the age of 51. Long before everybody dug him, his producer, Orrin Keepnews, titled a 1958 album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. The cover had autographed endorsements from Miles Davis, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal and Cannonball Adderley.

“Bill Evans has rare originality and taste,” Adderley wrote, “and the even rarer ability to make his conception of a number seem the definitive way to play it.” Adderley was perceptive and the album title was prophetic. Soon, Evans moved from acclaim by the jazz inner circle to the admiration of musicians everywhere and an audience that expanded throughout his regrettably short life. He had a profound effect on the development of the music. From Everybody Digs Bill Evans, we remember him with “Peace Piece.”

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Following his five years as the bassist in the Bill Evans Trio, Chuck Israels worked with a variety of leaders, among them J.J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock and Hampton Hawes. His repertory orchestra, The National Jazz Ensemble, and his writing for the Metropole Orchestra disclosed his range and depth as an arranger. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2010 after nearly a quarter of a century of teaching music at the university level. It wasn’t long before Israels organized an octet of some of the best musicians in the Pacific Northwest’s rich pool of talent. Much of the band’s music is arranged by Israels based on recorded performances of Evans. In a 2012 review of the band in performance, I wrote:

Translating the music from Evans’ fingers through eighty fingers and eight brains requires more than technical ability in playing and writing, although it must have plenty of that. It demands an understanding of and feeling for the underlying impulses and emotions in the music. [The Audience] was feeling what the musicians felt in the profundity, beauty and joy of Evans’ music.

The Chuck Israels Jazz Orchestra’s repertoire still includes interpretations of Evans, but Israels also applies his methods to other music. A new film portrait by Elijah Hasan captures Israels’ insistence on meticulousness as the band prepares for performance. It also allows the viewer glimpses of his home life, even unto salad-making. I suggest that you schedule adequate time for this 36-minute film. If you can watch it full-screen, so much the better. If you are asked for a password, use: Swing

This album by Israels and his octet is devoted to the music of Bill Evans. His 1970s work with the National Jazz Ensemble is on this CD.

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Bobby Medina, Between Worlds (Medina)

The trumpeter’s album includes much of the repertoire that he and his band played at the recent Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival—with dramatic differences. Orchestras with string sections at sessions in Buenos Aires and Seattle provide soaring accompaniments in arrangements by Medina, pianist Eric Verlinde, saxophonist-flutist Guto Lucena and Lucena’s fellow Brazilian Felipe Salles. To great effect, Salles’ setting of Tony Lujan’s “Forever My Love” alternates dreaminess and zest. Lucena’s arrangements of pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Astor Piazolla capture the composers’ spirits. Medina does the Mexican standard “La Bikina” as a waltz that allows him to double on flugelhorn and accordion.

Soloists include musicians from North and South America. On Piazolla’s “Libertango,” Seattleite Verlinde shines in a piano solo that sets up a dashing chase sequence with Medina and guest trumpeter Gustavo Bergalli from Argentina. Lucena demonstrates the power on flute and soprano saxophone that also informed his playing at Ystad. As the principal soloist, Medina is impressive not only for his command of the trumpet and flugelhorn, but also for the blues feeling often at the heart of his solos whether he’s improvising on traditional Latin music or an attractive hybrid like his “Tullum.”

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In the English language, the word “that” used as a conjunction can illuminate meaning and make for easier comprehension. Yet, today more and more editors and speakers eliminate the word, and clarity suffers. Here are examples from September 4 news accounts, the first from a newspaper business section, the second from a wire service.

VoloMetrix says its algorithms are designed to avoid scooping up non-work-related data, and in reports it defaults to group-related data on employees, not personally identifiable information—Seattle Times

If “that” followed “says” in the first line and followed “and” in the second, the meaning would be clearer.

He confirmed the family had wanted to go to Canada but now only wants to return to Kobane to bury their dead.—Agence France-Presse

The sentence is not technically wrong, but if “that” followed “confirmed”, the reading would be smoother. As it is, the eye stumbles momentarily.

Here is another example, hypothetical but common:

The senator said today his candidacy was in good shape.

“today” could refer to “said” or to his candidacy. If “that’ followed “said” there would be no doubt. It would also make the sentence a bit less awkward.

That’s that.

One of the precepts that old jazz pros have taught young musicians for years is that it’s vital to be able to play any piece of music in any key at any tempo. Here’s an example. It’s from the days a quarter of a century ago when vibraharpist Terry Gibbs and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco teamed up and toured extensively. Their rhythm section at a club called the Cliff Side in Yokohama, Japan, in 1991 was Larry Novak, piano; Herb Ellis, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Butch Miles, drums. Mr. Gibbs makes the introduction.

Had he lived, pianist Kenny Drew would have celebrated his 87th birthday today. Drew first recorded with trumpeter Howard McGhee in 1950, when he was 22. He went on to play and record with many of the leading artists in jazz, including Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Buddy DeFranco, Dinah Washington, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Johnny Griffin and Buddy Rich. Drew settled in Paris in 1961 and moved to Copenhagen three years later, where he became a featured artist at Jazzhus Montmartre. At the Montmartre, he played with Dexter Gordon, Kenny Dorham, Sonny Rollins and a variety of other visiting American stars and developed a bond with the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. His trio with NHOP and drummer Alvin Queen appeared to great acclaim throughout Europe. Here they are, the year before Drew’s death, at the Brewhouse Theater in Taunton, Somerset, England. They play the traditional song “Hush-a-Bye.”

Kenny Drew died on August 4, 1993 in Copenhagen. He is buried there in the Assistens Cemetry in Nørrebro.

The story in yesterday’s Rifftides post about Jaki Byard quoted drummer Alan Dawson’s excursion into phrases originated by the late Slim Gaillard. It could be argued that Gaillard was the hippest and most influential of all the hipsters of the 1940s and 1950s. He remained active well into his and the century’s seventh decade. He was an accomplished pianist and guitarist, but the public knew Gaillard best for vocal performances incorporating quirky language that had something in common with English. This piece updates an earlier Rifftides post about one of bebop’s most endearing figures.

In a gathering of people even younger than I, when I mentioned Slim Gaillard three of them said in unison, “Who?”

“Flat Foot Floogie,” I explained, “Cement Mixer, Putti Putti,” “Matzoh ball Oroony,” and—just to make sure they understood—”Poppity Poppity Poppity Pop Go De Motorcycle.”

Their blank stares made me realize that there must be other folks in the 21st century in need of remedial cultural education. We’ll begin with an audiovisual aid.

That was Slim Gaillard on The Tonight Show. The music as he walked off was the theme during Steve Allen’s tenure as host of the program, so it was probably the mid-1950s. By then, Gaillard had behind him a couple of decades of success that began in the late ’30s with Slim and Slam, a duo of Gaillard and bassist Slam Stewart. Their big hits were “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Cement Mixer,” novelties executed with superb musicianship. Columbia’s The Groove Juice Special CD has 20 of their recordings. Later, Gaillard teamed with another bassist, Bam Brown. Their Laughing In Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years has several tracks that include the great bop pianist Dodo Marmarosa and such other guests as Ben Webster, Dick Hyman, Ray Brown and Milt Jackson. Slim Gaillard at Birdland 1951 is a collection of performances when he was a regular at the New York club, with Art Blakey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Terry Gibbs, Brew Moore and others sitting in.

Well aware of Gaillard’s musicianship, the fathers of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, were happy to be guests on his recording session in Los Angeles on December 29, 1945. Gaillard is the pianist and raconteur, Jack McVea the tenor saxophonist, with Bam Brown on bass and Zutty Singleton playing drums in the blues titled “Slim’s Jam,” which is followed by the motorcycle epic.

Accurate information about Gaillard’s earliest years is hard to come by. This Wikipedia article seems to have what is available. If you would like to sample Gaillard’s extensive output of recordings, YouTube has dozens of them. Go here. In his later years, Gaillard sometimes worked as an actor in television shows including Marcus Welby M.D., Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible. He continued to appear in clubs in the US and Great Britain. He died in London in 1991 at age 75.

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A Rifftides reader, composer Michael Robinson, responded to the Monday recommendation of the Jaki Byard Project’s Inch by Inch (see the July 24 post) with a reflection on a Byard performance in a classic Phil Woods album. Mr. Robinson wrote:

One of the greatest jazz albums of all time is Musique du bois by Phil Woods, due in no small part to the appearance of Jaki Byard on piano, in addition to Alan Dawson on drums and Richard Davis on bass. Byard’s intrinsic contribution pertains both to his soloing and accompanying. Check out his performance on this phenomenal rendering of “Willow Weep For Me”:

I was privileged to be in the studio for the recording of Musique du bois, invited by producer Don Schlitten to write notes for the album. The notes were comprehensive, but when 32 Records reissued the music on a CD in 1997, the notes were gutted. Among the many sections left on the cutting room floor was the one that described the making of “Willow Weep For Me.” Therefore, as a public service in memory of a great day in RCA’s Studio B in Manhattan, here is that part of the story.

Woods’ head arrangement of “Willow Weep For Me” begins with the rhythm section playing the introductory pattern used by Miles Davis for “All Blues.” The plan is to continue the figure through the alto solo, but Woods finds it too monotonous. Take one is cut short. There are superior solos on take two from Woods, Byard and Davis, but the leader is interested in supplemental harmonic ideas and goes to the piano to suggest some chords. The third take opens faster, with Davis adding vibrato and Dawson slapping the brushes on his snare drum just enough to impart a happy dance feeling. Woods responds with a sunny solo that is in sharp contrast to the rather brooding statement of the previous take. He introduces a phrase from “Drum Boogie,” chromaticizing it outrageously. Davis solos with an abandon that causes a sharp collective intake of breath in the control room. Byard has a brilliant solo full of Tatum fragments, and the piano sweeps under Woods as he re-enters for a final chorus packed with modulations, piping high notes and gut-rumbling low tones.

“Okay,” Woods tells the control room, “we’ll bring in a brass section to put a chord on the end.”

While the others are listening to “Willow,” Dawson is on the phone to the Aladdin Delicatessen:“Cheese on rye…no sesame seeds in the rye.”

“Perhaps you’d prefer avacado seeds,” suggests an eavesdropper.

“Yes, with hot sauce,” Dawson grins, and he goes into a monologue full of such gustatory Slim Gaillardisms as mosquito knees, hippopotamus lips and reety pooties.

“Slim who?” some of you may be asking. Well, continuing in the spirit of public service, tomorrow’s Rifftides post will bring you up to date or—more accurately—back to date on Slim Gaillard.

As for Musique du bois, the 32 Records CD with truncated liner notes is still available. So too, it turns out, are copies of the LP with the full notes. Go here for information.

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As mentioned in Rifftides from time to time, many who attended or played in the original New Orleans Jazz Festival remember it as an example of what a jazz festival can be. The 1968 and 1969 editions of JazzFest were intimate compared with what later became the Jazz And Heritage Festival, a massive Crescent City party in which jazz is often more evident in the name than in the music.

Six of the people who made the ’69 festival memorable were its house band and its producer. The band was Clark Terry, trumpet; Zoot Sims, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Milt Hinton, bass; and Alan Dawson, drums. The producer was the Voice of America’s Willis Conover, who emceed part of the ’68 festival and whom the board of directors hired to be festival’s artistic guide the next year. The house band played often during the week of the festival. Among other appearances, they had a gig on a Mississippi river boat cruise. In major concerts, Byard, Dawson and Hinton supported Sarah Vaughan and the Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quintet.

Maristella Feustle, the librarian looking after the Willis Conover Archives at North Texas State University, sent an alert to video of Conover and the house band in a mini-concert at the ’69 festival. It was at the Court Of Two Sisters on Royal Street, then and now one of the French Quarter’s prime tourist spots.

A welcome surprise memento of a great jazz festival.

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Full disclosure: I wrote a section of the liner notes for a new compilation album by pianist Jan Lundgren. To assure critical objectivity, the senior Rifftides staff asked the veteran Swedish music journalist Jan Olsson to review the CD. Mr. Olsson’s review appears on the Swedish website DIG. We thank him and DIG for permission to post his work, and for his translation into English.

Jan Lundgren: A Retrospective (Fresh Sound)

Besides some CDs and LPs produced in Sweden and Japan, our own master pianist Jan Lundgren has recorded sixteen albums – nine of them under his own name – on the superb and very ambitious Spanish Fresh Sound label, today distributed all over the world. All but one were produced in Los Angeles by the legendary Dick Bank. The exception, Stockholm Get-Together from 1994, was produced by Jan himself.

Mr. Bank has now put together an excellent and varied Lundgren compilation. He has chosen twelve selections from ten of his own Fresh Sound productions, recorded between 1995 and 2003, and he presents them chronologically. He lets us listen to Jan entirely on his own, with his American trios and together with jazz celebrities like Bill Perkins, Conte Candoli, Herb Geller, Andy Martin and, last but not least, Arne Domnérus and Pete Jolly.

To mention any particular selections seems unnecessary since all original albums from which Mr. Bank has made his choices have already been reviewed. But the duo version of “Barney Goin´ Easy”, or “I´m Checkin´ Out Go´om Bye” as the Ellington/Strayhorn composition is also named, with Domnérus on clarinet is really something very special. It is drawn from Dompan!, the album that Arne himself considered his very best ever. The playful collaboration with Jolly is also something that will make you shout with joy— if you love high-quality piano jazz.

The bassists and drummers who enrich the album—in particular the radar pair of Chuck Berghofer and Joe La Barbera—are also well worth praising. And so is Jim Mooney, who is responsible for most of the excellent sound quality. He is a member of the same league as his east coast counterpart Rudy Van Gelder. Lots of roses, also, go to the man with the great ideas, a perpetual preserver of high quality and good taste, Mr. Dick Bank. He is like a manager in the highest Spanish soccer division who knows not only the exact capacity of every player but also how to bring it forth. But the most praise goes, of course, to Jan Lundgren, who today is on the same level as his great Swedish forerunners and sources of inspiration, Jan Johansson and Bengt Hallberg.

Finally: The CD booklet and liner notes to Dick Bank´s albums are always something very special with lots of high-quality and interesting information. This time the authors are Doug Ramsey, Dick Bank and— Jan Lundgren. If you don´t own most of Jan´s Fresh Sound albums already, I think that A Retrospective is, for every jazz piano fan, an almost necessary investigation.

Jan Olsson

Mr. Olsson has been one of Sweden’s most respected journalists for more than fifty years. He has contributed to Orkester Journalen and the Swedish-Danish magazine Jazz Stage. For a quarter of a century he was a regular host on Swedish Radio and on a number of television specials.