The Rifftides staff devoted a meeting to choosing a piece of music to bring you on this most American of holidays. After what seemed like hours of discussion, we bogged down in disagreement. Feelings may not have been running as high as in the Greek referendum campaign, but failure to reach a compromise had everyone on edge. We had a four-way tie. No one was giving in. Finally, the senior vice president for internal affairs came up with a plan that broke the tension. “Play them all,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” the office boy said. “No one will listen to all of those pieces.”

“Too bad for them,” the Sr. VP said, firmly. “Their loss.” She was persuasive. When the vote came, it was a unanimous decision. So, you get:

Al Cohn with Barry Harris, Sam Jones and Leroy Williams

“Sunday In America” from Ornette Coleman’s Skies Of America with the London Symphony Orchstra under David Measham

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day, Zubin Meta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic

And James Cagney in the title number from the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy

Now, you’re ready for that picnic.

Dave Bass, NYC Sessions (Whaling City Sound)

In the 1970s when pianist Dave Bass thought that a broken wrist had ended his career, he dropped out of music and into law school. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general of California. Through the years Bass continued to play, but not publicly until he agreed in 2005 to sit in at a party. He told liner note writer Bob Blumenthal that one of the musicians invited him to a jam session, where he discovered how much he missed music, “and it just came pouring out.” That led to revitalization of his jazz life, then to a 2009 album, Gone, and now to NYC Sessions.

The collaboration with bassist Harvie S and drummer Ignacio Berroa discloses a pianist with feeling, taste, technique and gifts as a composer, arranger and lyricist. Alto saxophonist Phil Woods is on six of the eleven pieces, at 83 brimming with vigor, fresh ideas and—on “Baltic Bolero”— plaintiveness that captures the essence of the bolero form. There are guest appearances by trombonists Conrad Herwig and Chris Washburne, flutist Enrique Fernandez, percussionist Carlos Caro and singers Karrin Allyson and Paulette McWilliams. Bass’s lyrics may not be in a league with Johnny Mercer’s or Lorenz Hart’s, but Allyson uses softness and understatement to make the most of the ballads “Endless Waltz” and “Lost Valentine.” The passion in McWilliams’ voice is suited to the blues character and inflections of “Since I Found You” and “Just A Fool.” The Latin nature of several pieces is a striking aspect of the album; Bass’s and Woods’ simpatico relationship in “Silence” is a high point. With this welcome release, Dave Bass seems to have declared that, at 65, he’s back.

Tiempo Libre, Panamericano (Universal Music Latino)

This is Tiempo Libre’s fourth album since the conservatory-trained young Cubans emigrated to the US and formed their band in Miami in 2001. Like its predecessors, the new collection is based in Cuba’s eclectic timba tradition, melding elements of salsa, rhythm and blues, jazz patterns in the horn section and several strains of Afro-Cuban folk music. Its hallmarks are irresistible rhythms, vocal choruses delivered with passion, good cheer and—often—irony, as in “Dime Que No.” Panamericano, in keeping with its title, incorporates influences from other regions of Latin America as well as Cuba. Tiempo Libre is capable of not only extrovert excitement but also lyricism and reflection. Case in point: the relatively slow “Grandpa,” with its lovely flute work by Fabian Álvarez, one of several guest artists.

There will be a funeral service for the saxophonist, composer, bandleader and iconoclast Ornette Coleman in Manhattan at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, June 27. Coleman died on June 11 at the age of 85. Rifftides noted his passing that day. The service at The Riverside Church, between W. 122 St. and W. 120 St., will be open to the public.

Thoughts of Coleman took me to a day in the 1960s not long after the release of his album Free Jazz. I was living in New Orleans. The alto saxophonist Al Belletto (1928-2014) and I were having one of our Saturday listening sessions. I put Free Jazz on the turntable, placed the needle and waited for his reaction. Al reached musical maturity in the Crescent City’s traditional jazz community. His quintet of young beboppers achieved a good deal of national success in the 1950s and early sixties. Many musicians of his age and background were mystified by or indignant about Coleman’s departures from the harmonic and rhythmic norms of early jazz, swing and bop. If Belletto had paid attention to the free jazz movement that Coleman to a large extent initiated, he never mentioned it in our get-togethers.

A few minutes into Free Jazz, Belletto was nodding his head and smiling. He said that the interaction in what Coleman and his double quartet were playing had the spirit of “what the old guys used to do” in post-funeral parades and jam sessions. Coleman had lived in New Orleans for six months in 1949 and 1950 and spent time with young modern jazz strivers—drummer Ed Blackwell, clarinetist Alvin Batiste, cornetist Melvin Lastie, pianist Ellis Marsalis and others. As far as I know, he and Belletto never met. How much traditional New Orleans jazz Coleman heard in addition to the approaches he absorbed from Batiste and company, we may never know. But the collective improvisation of Free Jazz connected immediately to a New Orleans musician who recognized tradition when he heard it and didn’t let preconceptions or labels affect his hearing.

For our weekend listening, let’s hear the title track of Free Jazz. On the left channel are Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Scott LaFaro, bass; and Billy Higgins, drums. On the right channel: Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums. December 21, 1960 in New York City.

For commentary, I defer to the final two paragraphs of the original liner notes by the late Martin Williams.

Jazzmen have tried spontaneous group improvising without preconceptions before, of course—and almost invariably fallen into playing the blues within an acceptable key. It is surely a most telling tribute to the importance of this music that all of these young men, of different experience in jazz, were able to contribute spontaneously and sustain a performance like this one.

On the other hand, the man who isn’t bothered about ‘newness’ or ‘difference,’ but says only that, ‘He sounds like someone crying, talking, laughing,’ is having the soundest sort of response to Ornette Coleman’s music.

In 1997 pianist Greg Reitan faced a problem familiar to many musicians. Practicing and trio rehearsals in his Los Angeles apartment building were bothering the neighbors. In their search for more private quarters Reitan and his wife—Meredith Drake, a PhD in urban planning—saw a listing for an artists retreat. They investigated and found a house on a ridge in Highland Park, overlooking Pasadena. It was well away from the nearest neighbors.

The prototype Concept 2 modular home was designed and built in the 1960s by J. Lamont Langworthy, an architect who specialized in low-cost prefab houses occupying difficult sites. He covered the inside and outside walls with rough redwood plywood. Although the house contains less than a thousand square feet, sliding glass doors open to redwood decks on either end, giving it a feeling of spaciousness and light. A truss module down the middle stabilizes the building and provides added visual interest. “We fell in love,” Reitan told writer Diane Krieger of the alumni magazine at the University of Southern California, where he and his wife went to college in the 1990s.

When the Reitans moved in with their Steinway grand piano, they were thrilled to find a bonus; those rough-sawn redwood walls created warm acoustics with nominal vibration, properties ideal for a recording studio. So, in addition to practicing without fear of bothering anyone, Reitan began recording rehearsals with his longtime sidemen, bassist Jack Daro and drummer Dean Korba, fellow graduates of USC’s Thornton School of Music. That led to four albums, all released by Sunnyside. Post No Bills appeared in 2014, Daybreak in 2011, Antibes in 2010 and Some Other Time in 2009. “When we’re recording, it’s a fairly simple setup,” Reitan told Ms. Krieger, “We use the natural acoustics of the house. We don’t multitrack. There’s no mixing stage involved. The performance we record is it. It’s very real.”

As for Reitan’s style, here are excerpts from the Rifftides review of Antibes:

Reitan’s inner Bud Powell filters through Bill Evans and Denny Zeitlin. If there is direct Powell influence, it is more in his adaptation of harmonic concepts than in a reflection of Powell’s manic energy. His keyboard touch and chord voicings are firmly in the Evans school. He shares with Evans, Zeitlin and–consciously or unconsciously–with Keith Jarrett, the floating time feeling that comes from rhythmic placement relating chords to individual notes.

The tracks with Reitan’s own writing are the ones I keep going back to in Antibes. He told Orrin Keepnews, who wrote the admiring liner notes, that when he was preparing the album he had been listening to Glenn Gould play J.S. Bach. The title tune, the unaccompanied “September” and “Salinas” are direct reflections of that experience. Reitan so skillfully conceived them with Bachian rhythmic and harmonic principles and plays them with such precision and dynamic touch that one might almost be willing accept that Gould had come back as a jazz artist.

Architect J. Lamont Langworthy has designed a wide range of California houses, from modest ones like the Reitans’ to spectacular hillside mansions. Now well into his eighties, he is still at work.

(All photos but Langworthy © Kelly Barrie)

Gunther Schuller wrote two books about the history and development of jazz. The first, published by the Oxford University Press in 1968 was Early Jazz. The second —in 1989—was The Swing Era. They were detailed histories, deeply researched and bolstered with musical examples painstakingly annotated by Schuller as he listened to and analyzed thousands of recordings. Schuller died yesterday at 89 (see the previous Rifftides post). For 25 years listeners, musicians and scholars have been anticipating a third volume about the evolution of bebop and the music that has followed it. In a comment on the earlier post, reader Tom King echoed the hopes of those whose reading of Schuller enriched their understanding of the formative early decades of jazz. “Here’s hoping, Mr. King wrote, “that the book is in the works, or in someone’s competent hands.”

Schuller and first I met in 1969 at Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday party at the White House. The last time I called him, a year or so ago, I asked about progress on volume three. I told him that I was recording the conversation for possible future use. How I wish that the use were under happier circumstances. Gunther’s answer touches on the dilemmas that often confront artists who face the realities of existence.

Look, here’s the story. I have received in the last two-and-a-half years twenty commissions—that’s the term for writing pieces of music for somebody, for a symphony, for a chamber group and so on. That is unheard of in the whole history of music, for a composer in a two-year period to get twenty commissions. I remember when Aaron Copeland and I, one year about half a century ago, each got four commissions in a year. We thought that was unbelievable, and Aaron said to me, “What the hell did I do to deserve this?” So, the conundrum about the jazz book or the autobiography—I also promised a second volume of my autobiography—the conundrum is this: when I compose music I make money. I have not retired. I have to work. I have to write all these pieces, and I need to make money. While, on the other hand, if I start writing a book, I lose money.

To be specific, for example, to write a book might take me six years, especially a complicated one which would like to deal with most of the music that has happened in the period since my second volume ended. Then there would be, maybe, two to three years to find a publisher, then the production of the book. Then, finally, the next year I might get a royalty check for a hundred and twenty dollars and thirty-two cents. So, when I write books I lose money. When I compose music I make money, which, as I say, I still have to.

I’m 88 years old now. I’m very productive. Gunther Schuller is somewhat famous for figuring out how to do things, and he’s done a lot of multi-tasking in his life. And one way or another, unless I get very sick or something, I’m certainly determined to do that extra volume. How I would manage it right now I don’t know, but I will do it, particularly if I live quite a few more years. And mind you, the other problem is that the second volume—The Swing Era book—was totally comprehensive. Anyone I talked to, I wrote extensively about them. I listened to every damn record that Tommy Dorsey recorded (he laughs), and the first four years of Dorsey’s band were not the most exciting listening, until Sy Oliver came in—wow. Anyway, it was totally comprehensive. I cannot do that. I listened to 30,000 records to write that volume, to be that comprehensive. I would have to be more selective, and that’s fine, too. So, somehow or other, I will figure this out before I die.

I know of no evidence that he started volume three.

Gunther Schuller, who was prominent in classical music and stimulated attention to a hybrid movement in jazz, died today in Boston. He was 89. In addition to his authorship of influential modern classical pieces, Schuller in the late 1950s melded jazz and classical influences and came up with a label for it that stuck: Third Stream. In the l960s and l970s he was president of the New England Conservatory. His classical composition “Of Reminiscences and Reflections” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

In jazz, Schuller first won prominence playing French horn in Miles Davis’s 1949/1950 Birth Of The Cool ensemble. Later in the fifties, he, Davis, John Lewis, George Russell, Charles Mingus and others made Third Stream music a phenomenon that has left a lasting impression. His “Symphony for Brass and Percussion” is an example his marriage of idioms. In this conversation with Frank J. Oteri of the New Music Box website, Schuller discusses several aspects of his career, including his use of the twelve-tone row in composition and the system in the top levels of the jazz community for endorsing new talent.

For expanded thoughts on Schuller and the Third Stream, see this Rifftides entry from five years ago. I will have more about him in the next post.

Gunther Schuller, RIP

One of the pre-eminent alto and tenor saxophonists of his time, James Moody (1925-2010) was also a flutist of extraordinary technique and imagination. Dozens of saxophonists have doubled on flute and a few—Sam Most, Eric Dolphy and Paul Horn, among them—have become as well-known for their flute playing as for their saxophone work. Moody was celebrated equally for both. For eight years in the 1960s and 1970s he was the other horn in Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet. From the mid-forties they were so close musically and personally that Gillespie once said, “Playing with James Moody is like playing with a continuation of myself.”

Here is the Gillespie quintet in France in 1965. Dizzy introduces the members. Moody flutes the blues.

Have a good weekend.

Maria Schneider Orchestra, The Thompson Fields (artistShare)

Maria Schneider leads a band of eighteen of the best musicians in New York and keeps winning awards for being on the leading edge of composers and arrangers. Yet, her orchestra’s first album in eight years does not draw its primary inspiration from big city life or the yeasty New York jazz scene. The music reflects the peacefulness and the sometimes-volatile atmosphere of the heartland where she grew up. Memories of the small southwestern Minnesota town of Windom and its surrounding prairie inform most of the pieces in the collection. Side trips to New Guinea and Brazil and a tribute to a departed band member are consistent with the character of the world Schneider creates in eight compositions. She does not call The Thompson Fields a suite, but its unity of style and its mood of reflection would justify that designation.

Ted Kooser’s poem “November 18” inspired the piece Schneider calls “Walking By Flashlight.” The quiet dynamics of her orchestration support a solo by Scott Robinson on alto clarinet, an instrument seldom used in modern music. Robinson employs it with the intimacy the piece demands. Schneider’s longtime pianist Frank Kimbrough solos in the same mood. Kimbrough later shines with guitarist Lage Lund on the album’s title piece inspired by a farm near Windom owned by Schneider’s family friends the Thompsons. “The Monarch and the Milkweed” features trombonist Marshall Gilkes and flugelhornist Greg Gisbert. Subtle brush strokes painted into the soundscape by drummer Clarence Penn contrast with the intensity of Schneider’s orchestration. Superb engineering, mixing and post-production mastering enhance such nuances.

“Arbiters of Evolution,” the New Guinea excursion, reflects on the competitive displays of male birds-of-paradise. A big piece of orchestral impressionism packed with energy, it features long virtuosic solos by tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and Robinson on baritone sax. The two then improvise exchanges suggesting the dazzling exhibitions that male birds perform as they compete for the attention of a female deciding on a mate. Schneider’s album notes describe how she was moved by film of those touching and funny avian performances. Her score and the band’s energy capture both aspects.

“Nimbus” recalls tension, fear and weird beauty in a part of the Midwest subject to storms that bring the sudden violence of tornadoes—and the relief when one passes without leaving a trail of destruction. “A Potter’s Song” memorializes Laurie Frink (1951-2013), who was the Schneider orchestra’s lead trumpeter. Gary Versace is the soloist in the elegy, playing with taste unlikely to generate new accordion jokes. In other pieces, Schneider employs simple accordion lines by Versace as commentary or as artful contrast with the ensemble. One such instance is the introduction to “Home,” a thread of single notes from the accordion. The featured soloist, tenor saxophonist Rich Perry, enters with his pure tone, wafting on hymn-like orchestral chords as he and the rhythm section gather intensity. Schneider’s voicings of the orchestra’s bottom notes in this piece are a highlight of the album.

“Lembranca” is Schneider’s remembrance of the influential Brazilian musician Paulo Moura (1932-2010) and her visit with him to a Rio de Janeiro samba school where he was a hero. Trombonist Ryan Keberle and bassist Jay Anderson have lengthy solos; Keberle’s expansive, Anderson’s compelling in spite of—or perhaps because of—his soft tone. Kimbrough and Versace play important roles in setting the temper of the piece. Penn’s drumming and the work of guest percussionist Rogerio Boccato impart the samba spirit. Schneider’s orchestration uses dynamics to build excitement, and then lets it subside slowly for a satisfying end to the piece and the album.

The Thompson Fields was a major project in these days when economic challenges make it difficult—putting it mildly—to keep a big band together. artistShare fans made Schneider’s album possible through contributions. It would be lovely to think that public demand for music of this quality can guarantee its survival. But in what is still the world’s richest economy, all indicators seem to suggest that the future of serious large-scale creative works may well depend on gifts, whether through the small contributions of crowdfunding or the generosity of major donors.

In the fall of 1965 pianist Bill Evans, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Alan Dawson toured parts of Western Europe. It was both a time of Cold War tension and a time when jazz enjoyed popularity in every part of the continent. In countries behind the Iron Curtain, jazz devotees risked being caught at their shortwave radios listening to Willis Conover on the forbidden Voice of America. In Western Europe, nowhere was openness to jazz more evident than in Scandinavia, where the quartet played at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall.