A few major record labels survive, but most jazz albums come from independent companies, many of them one-man or one-woman operations. Digital technology makes recording relatively simple and inexpensive for small independent labels. It also makes it easy for musicians to be their own record companies. Some record at home in living rooms or basements. Those with good gear and a modicum of engineering skill can achieve high quality sound. The business of making records has come a long way since the painstaking, labor-intensive process the film in this recent Rifftides piece illustrates. One of the results is that at a time when the audience for jazz is holding at about two percent of the record market, more jazz CDs than ever are being recorded.

Until fairly recently, the non-technological roadblocks to do-it-yourself record businesses were distribution, promotion, advertising and publicity. Internet uploading, the rise of social media and the expanding population of independent publicists have changed that. Indeed, some musicians are their own publicists and distributors by way of their websites, Facebook pages, email lists, the postal department, FedEx and UPS. Getting a record out and calling attention to it is relatively easy. That presents the listener with an embarrassment of riches (to be optimistic about musical quality). The reviewer must face the impossibility of giving thorough hearings to even a small percentage of the CDs that show up on his doorstep, sometimes as many as a half-dozen a day.

All the reviewer—this one, at least—can do is try to listen to as much as possible, write the occasional full-length review and otherwise share impressions of some of what he hears. Here are recommendations, some in brief, of recent and a few not-so-recent arrivals.

Mike Wofford, It’s Personal (Capri)

In this album with the apt title, Wofford’s harmonic and rhythmic approaches to Johnny Carisi’s “Springsville,” make the piece his own. A few seconds into the track, the listener abandons the idea of comparing Wofford’s version with the indelible 1957 Miles Davis-Gil Evans recording. At some points the pianist seems to be floating, as if the piece were a leisurely nocturne rich with underlying chords. And yet, the pulse that powers his performance continues throughout, however subliminally. The unfailing jazz feeling of his playing and his ingenuity with chord voicings are evident everywhere in the dozen tracks of this solo album, a highlight in Wofford’s extensive discography. He imparts his personal stamp to pieces by Jackie McLean, Dizzy Gillespie, Gigi Gryce, the guitarist Larry Koonse, among others.

Wofford gives Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “The Eighth Veil” a reflective reading quite apart from the rhythmic insistence of Ellington’s 1962 big band recording. He includes a medley of two pieces with the same name, “Once in a Lifetime.” The first is the 1960s standard by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The other is by the new wave band Talking Heads. He makes the Talking Heads song a solid jazz vehicle while retaining the rock group’s whimsy. Among Wofford’s original compositions, “Cole Porter” captures something of the drama and elegance of its namesake and his songs. “It’s Personal” opens with melodic foreshadowing and harmonies that may have to do with John Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice,” then it blossoms into a distinctive ballad. “Hines Catch-up” is a medium-tempo F blues dedicated to Earl Hines. It is a knowing appreciation of the father of modern jazz piano, with side trips through a couple of Art Tatum runs. It is also a self-portrait by a pianist capable of paying homage without lapsing into imitation or parody or being anyone but himself. In this track, the album’s good feeling, relaxation and solid values are at their zenith.

Rudresh Mahanthappa, Gamak (ACT)

An alto saxophonist, Mahanthappa melds his American jazz values and Indian cultural heritage—along with a number of other ingredients—into original music that cannot be categorized. The album is dedicated to the proposition that melody rules, and that melody and wild excitement can go hand in hand. To an extent, the music is built around Dave Fiuczynski, a guitarist who can reach instant intensity. But Mahanthappa is the guiding spirit, a powerful soloist and a leader with a vision that Fiuczynski, bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Dan Weiss help him achieve with unity, superb musicianship and riveting energy.

Jeremy Pelt, Water And Earth (High Note)

Pelt applies the warmth and brilliance of his trumpet playing to his original compositions and a piece by bassist Stanley Clarke. The rhythm section features Fender Rhodes piano and electric bass throughout and, occasionally, muffled singing. The album has a jazz fusion aspect that reaches back to the 1970s, with occasional use of heavy drum echo and other electronic sounds. Interesting soloing by Pelt and saxophonist Roxy Cross, who is notable on tenor, usually overcomes the lounge atmosphere. The credits list “Jeremy Pelt: trumpet, effects.” Sometimes, in “Boom Bishop” for instance, the effects win. When his trumpet is unadorned, he wins.

Next time: more brief reviews.

Now that the White House has announced President Obama’s Medal of Freedom winners for 2013, the sniping begins over his choices. Here is my snipe. Whatever Arturo’s Sandoval’s merits as a musician, they are put in perspective by his biography in the White House announcement, which notes that the trumpeter and pianist was a protégé of Dizzy Gillespie. (They are pictured together). That shines a bright light on the fact that while he was alive and in the 20 years since his death, Gillespie has been ignored in the Medal of Freedom selections. The medals can be awarded posthumously, and three of this year’s will be.

Sandoval is an accomplished musician, but I suspect that the dramatic story of his escape to the United States from Castro’s Cuba carried more weight in his selection than his standing as an artist. Gillespie was among the most important figures of the twentieth century as a trumpeter, the leading theoretical teacher in the bebop movement, a pioneering international cultural ambassador for the US and a dynamic and inspirational presence in American life. Let us hope that in the 2014 round of medal deliberations, President Obama will give serious consideration to Gillespie and, while he’s at it, to alto saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920-1955), the genius who called Gillespie, “the other half of my heartbeat.”

Here, alphabetically, is the complete list of 2013 Medal of Freedom Winners:

Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs home run star and hall of famer.
Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post.
Former President Bill Clinton.
Senator Daniel Inouye, (posthumous), first Japanese-American elected to Congress, WWII Medal of Honor winner.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist.
Richard Lugar, former US Senator, bipartisan leader in the movement to reduce threat of nuclear weapons.
Loretta Lynn, country music vocalist.
Mario Molina, chemist and environmental scientist.
Sally Ride (posthumous), first US female astronaut in space.
Bayard Rustin, (posthumous), pioneer of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter, pianist, composer.
Dean Smith, University of North Carolina basketball coach from 1961 to 1997, with two national championships and a record-setting number of wins.
Gloria Steinmen, writer and women’s equality activist.
C.T. Vivian, minister, author, organizer, civil rights leader.
Patricia Wald, retired chief judge of US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Oprah Winfrey, broadcast journalist, talk show host, philanthropist.

And here, for those who need a reminder, is nearly an hour of Dizzy Gillespie with the group of his peers known as the Giants of Jazz, in Copenhagen in 1971: Kai Winding, trombone; Sonny Stitt, saxophone; Thelonious Monk, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums. We rarely post videos of this length on Rifftides, but in most of the northern hemisphere it’s too hot to be outside and in much of the southern, too cold. This will help you stay cool, or warm, or just right.

Accolades to Sergio Balint for placing that video on YouTube

Denny Zeitlin, Both/And (Sunnyside)

One-man bands have come a long way since 1941, when Sidney Bechet recorded “The Sheik of Araby.” Playing clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones, piano, bass and drums, Bechet and the RCA engineers laboriously added an instrument in each of a succession of takes until the band was all present and accounted for on one master 78 rpm disc. Today’s digital electronics simplify the process and expand the possibilities, but one thing has not changed since Bechet’s painstaking feat—the need for virtuosity by the performer and the recording engineer. For the first six tracks in Both/And, Zeitlin fills both roles. He records on acoustic and electric pianos and creates synthesizer sounds that are uncannily like those of brass, reed, string and rhythm instruments and a choir. In the five sections of the kaleidoscopic “Monk-y Business Revisited,” he shares producing and recording credit with electronic music pioneer Patrick Gleeson.

Zeitlin, a psychiatrist, made his first major impact when he was a medical student. As the pianist on Jeremy Steig’s Flute Fever, his playing, in particular his solo on “Oleo,” came in for enthusiastic critical notice. Flute Fever has never been reissued on CD. He followed with four trio albums for Columbia that established him as one of the leading young pianists in jazz.
In the late 1960s and through much of the seventies, Zeitlin changed direction. On his website, he describes the shift:

I withdrew from public performance to research possibilities in electronic music, hire engineers to build sound-altering equipment, modify existing keyboards and synthesizers, build systems and racks, and find kindred musical spirits. What emerged was an evolving set-up that looked like a 747 cockpit of 7+ keyboards and synths, myriad processors and pedals, (and) what seemed like miles of connectors…

Some of Zeitlin’s music from his first electronic period is on Expansion, an album that he recorded and released on his own after record companies turned it down, even as his trio records continued to sell. There is more of his electronic work in the soundtrack he composed for the 1978 remake of the science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His work in the film brought praise from critics including Paulene Kael of The New Yorker, who wrote, “…dazzling score…the music is a large contributor to the jokes and terrors.” Zeitlin’s demanding involvement with the movie drained him of desire to do further motion picture writing and performing. Through the ‘80s, ‘90s and into the new century he has concentrated largely on acoustic piano while maintaining his day gigs; psychiatric practice and university teaching. He has chronicled his work on the Steinway in several recent releases on Sunnyside Records.

In Both/And, Zeitlin returns to the electronic arena with a collection so finely crafted that his means of producing it are considerations secondary to the success of the music as music. A piece called “Meteorology” is a meditation on Weather Report, the group in which Joe Zawinul pioneered the synthesizer in jazz. It opens with Zeitlin’s convincing approximation of Jaco Pastorius’s electric bass. The bass provides the backbone and continuity of the piece. Once the atmosphere is established, the listener’s attention goes to the quality and content of the solos and ensembles. What Zeitlin achieves in integrating the elements could have come only through meticulous labor in the studio, but in “Meteorology” and throughout the CD the music imparts the impression of spontaneity. That is as true of the mysterious “Dawn,” with its intimations of Alan Hovahness or Kryzsztof Penderecki abstraction, as of the “trombone” like a rampaging bull elephant in the jungle of “Tiger, Tiger.”

Zeitlin’s Steinway is prominent in a ballad, “Kathryn’s Song,” interacting with a string orchestra in “Dystopian Uprising” and in “Monk-y Business Revisited.” If only real string sections could achieve the phrasing and swing feeling that Zeitlin gives the “strings” in the “Into The Funk” section of “Monk-y Business.” It’s an orchestra of Harry Lookofskys. As for percussion, if I didn’t know that this project is essentially a one-man operation, I would suspect Zeitlin and Gleeson of editing a live drummer and a trap set into the final mix.

This is a substantial album, fascinating for its musicianship, variety, good humor and the multifaceted talents of Denny Zeitlin

For an idea of what the RCA post-production crew went through half a dozen times to make the two-and-a-half-minute Sidney Bechet record mentioned in the Zeitlin review in the post above, watch these films about the complexities of the record-making process 72 years ago. The narrator is Milton Cross, for 43 years the host of the Metropolitan Opera’s weekly live radio performances.

Louis Armstrong was born on this day in 1901. When he was 26, he recorded King Oliver’s “West End Blues” with an opening cadenza that put the world on notice that this new music was an art form to be taken seriously. How big was Armstrong’s impact on the development of jazz in the late 1920s? No one has described it more succinctly than one of his greatest admirers, the cornetist Ruby Braff. Braff said that Armstrong “changed everything.”

Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five: Earl Hines piano; Jimmy Strong clarinet; Fred Robinson, trombone; Mancy Carr, banjo; Zutty Singleton, drums; Armstrong trumpet and vocal. June 28, 1928.

In one of my Rifftides posts on last October’s Oregon Coast Jazz Party, I told you a little about the remarkable program in which Bill Mays traced the development of modern jazz piano. Here’s that section from October 12, 2012

Bill Mays’ History of Jazz Piano concert for a morning audience covered pianists from James P. Johnson to Herbie Hancock. Teddy Wilson, Bill Evans and Bud Powell were among the 13 whose styles Mays summoned without surrendering his individuality. Tommy Flanagan and Sonny Clark had to be set aside when time ran short. I had the privilege of providing narration leading into each of Bill’s segments. That put me in the second best seat in the house in the curve of the nine-foot Steinway as Mays poured himself into interpreting some of the pianists who influenced his development. It was a great experience, with a responsive audience, and so much fun that we’re thinking of doing it again sometime, somewhere.

When the program ended, Bill and I were satisfied enough with it that we sought out the house audio crew to see if they had recorded it. They hadn’t. Well, that was the end of that, we said, although as noted at the conclusion of the report, we hoped that we could do it again. We still do. It turns out that the concert hadn’t quite disappeared. Yesterday we discovered that the festival management had a snippet of it videotaped.

But wait, there’s more. The following morning, Bill played a trio set with Portland bassist Tom Wakeling and Washington, DC, drummer Chuck Redd. Here’s some of what I wrote about it:

The Sunday morning wrap session began with Mays updating and expanding the repertoire of his CD Mays at the Movies. He, Wakeling and Redd concentrated on music from films he admires, has written for, or on whose soundtracks he played. The admiration category included the classics “Laura,” “The Very Thought of You” and “Smile.” His own “Cool Pool” was a Miles Davis “All Blues” clone that he wrote for a producer who didn’t want to pay a heavy licensing fee to use the Davis original.

Holly Hofmann, the gifted flutist who serves as the Oregon Coast Jazz Party’s music director, explains that she has only short portions of the festival concerts videotaped for use in promotion and marketing. Gratitude for small favors is in order, but it’s too bad that there aren’t full-length videos for the archives.

Go here for information about the 2013 festival October 4-6.

As reported in this Rifftides coverage last fall, a concert by the Clayton Brothers is likely to become a party. John and Jeff Clayton and their band partied again at the recent Jazz Port Townsend festival on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Jim Wilke, a fine recording engineer as well as an award-winning broadcaster, captured the Claytons and will feature their performance on his Jazz Northwest program this Sunday. Here is Jim Levitt’s photograph of the band and a guest at the concert.

And here is Mr. Wilke’s announcement:

A concert by the Clayton Brothers quintet and special guest Stefon Harris is the first of a seven concert series from Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend which will air on Jazz Northwest, Sunday August 4 at 2 PM PDT on 88.5 KPLU.

Co-led by brothers John Clayton (bass) and Jeff Clayton (alto sax and flute), the group also includes John’s son Gerald on piano, Terell Stafford on trumpet, and Obed Calvaire, drums.  John Clayton is also Artistic Director of Jazz Port Townsend and the Jazz Camp which leads up to the weekend festival, now in its 40th year.  Special guest on this concert is the vibraphonist Stefon Harris, who is one of the brightest stars on the insrument.  He has seven CDs as a leader and has been a popular sideman in many situations including the Clayton Brothers.

Concerts from Jazz Port Townsend will air on alternate weeks during coming months, with the Anat Cohen Quartet next on August 18.  Also in the series are concerts by Bria Skonberg, René Marie and Sachal Vasandani, the Centrum All-Star Band directed by Clarence Acox in a Salute to Quincy Jones, Cyrille Aimée and Diego Figueredo, and The Anthony Wilson Nonet.

Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for 88.5 KPLU.  The program airs Sundays at 2 PM Pacific, and is available as a podcast at kplu.org after the broadcast.  Special thanks to Rick Chinn and Neville Pearsall for assistance with recording at Jazz Port Townsend.

Oh, what the heck, let’s add the Clayton Brothers quintet at work. The video is from The Pittsburgh Jazzlive festival in June, 2012. It provides a sample of this intergenerational band’s togetherness and—at the end&#151of young Obed Calvaire’s drumming energy.

Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (Mosaic)

In a couple of record dates when Woody Shaw was 21 and in a dozen years through the 1970s and ‘80s, Muse Records captured some of the trumpeter’s most innovative and inspired work. When Shaw emerged, it was clear that Freddie Hubbard had influenced the younger man but, as he was to demonstrate, the model Shaw reflected most profoundly was not a trumpeter but a saxophonist, John Coltrane. The characterization of Shaw as a Hubbard clone persists in some quarters to this day, but at his most brilliant he was one of the great individualists of his generation of jazz artists. His intelligence, creative drive and technical mastery are plain to hear in his solos on the five quintet pieces he recorded with tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson in late 1965. “Cassandranite” and “Three Muses” from those sessions are early indicators of his gift for composition as well as playing.

By 1974, Shaw had processed Coltrane’s innovations so that when he recorded “The Moontrane,” a piece he wrote in his teens, he was indicating the way out of what many young musicians saw as a creative dead zone in which jazz was languishing in the early ’70s. Shaw helped demonstrate that it was possible to admire Coltrane, even adore him as a guru, without apeing his every mannerism. In pieces such as “The Moontrane” “Zoltan” and “Katrina Ballerina,” Joe Bonner’s “Love Dance” and Larry Young’s “Obsequious,” Shaw reached a level of expressiveness, headlong linear development and freedom from post-bop conventions that was not only ahead of his time; this music from three and four decades ago is ahead of much of the rote, formulaic jazz of our time. The Mosaic box set makes it clear to what an extent Shaw was at once a liberator of the music and a preserver of tradition.

His respect for the mainstream is manifest in the set’s final two CDs containing 14 standards, among them “The Touch Of Your Lips,” “There Is No Greater Love,” “It Might As Well Be Spring” and “All The Way,” which concludes with a riveting Shaw cadenza on flugelhorn. He also plays, faster than fast, on trumpet “The Woody Woodpecker Song,” often quoted in solos but rarely, if ever before, given recognition as a full-fledged vehicle for improvisation. Shaw’s and pianist Kenny Barron’s solos elevate the song’s stature so that the 1948 novelty almost seems to belong with “Imagination,” “If I Were A Bell,” “Dat Dere” and “Stormy Weather.” In several of the sessions, markedly in the standards albums, Shaw’s and trombonist Steve Turre’s compatibility is essential to the music’s feeling of cohesiveness—and its humor.

The five pieces Shaw recorded with his seven-piece band at the 1976 Berlin Jazz Festival—notably the epic “Hello to the Wind”—are enduring examples of the possibilities for harmonic texture in medium-sized jazz groups. In terms of sheer improvisational exuberance, the exchanges on the Berlin version of “Obsequious” between Shaw and trombonist Slide Hampton and those between saxophonists Rene McLean and Frank Foster rank with the most exhilarating chases ever captured on record.

His contemporaries and a number of perceptive older musicians understood Shaw’s importance and welcomed the opportunity to work with him. His teaming with Dexter Gordon, commemorated on Gordon’s Columbia albums, enhanced the saxophonist’s triumphant return to the United States after decades in Europe. The list of Shaw’s collaborators in this seven-CD set is a cross-section of leading players that includes, as mentioned, Henderson, Foster, McLean, Hampton, Turre, Barron and Young. Others are Herbie Hancock, Frank Strozier, Ron Carter, Buster Williams, Ray Drummond, Victor Lewis, Peter Leitch, Kenny Garrett, Neil Swainson, Cedar Walton, Louis Hayes, Steve Turre and the avant gardists Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. As usual with Mosaic sets, production is first rate, with thorough discographical information, plenty of photographs of Shaw and several of his sidemen and interesting session-by-session notes by his son, Woody Shaw III. Audio remastering by Malcolm Addey is excellent.

Shortly before his death, deteriorating vision, addiction, his uneven lifestyle and a subway accident in which he lost an arm brought an end to Shaw’s career. Throughout the Mosaic set, his intellectual and physical energy, harmonic innovation and mastery of melody are reminders of what we lost when he died at the age of 44 in 1989, two years after the last of these Muse sessions.

The Rifftides webmaster received a communiqué from the distinguished songwriter Mickey Leonard (pictured) about the Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth videos in the next exhibit.

This is the absolute best thing I’ve ever seen/heard with “Stayin’
Alive” & those two spectacular dancers. Bravo for such a wonderful thing to do. Without question, fantastic!!! Thank you from a most appreciative composer who generally doesn’t like anything. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!

Mr. Leonard—described by critic Will Friedwald as “a beloved staple of the jazz and cabaret scenes”—is the composer of “I’m All Smiles,” “Why Did I Choose You” and “Not Exactly Paris,” among other standard songs. His arrangement of Luiz Eca’s “The Dolphin” is the highlight of the 1969 album From Left to Right, in which he collaborated with pianist Bill Evans. Here is what I wrote about that Evans track in a Down Beat magazine review.

Evans’ solo on “The Dolphin” is one of his finest, on a par with his best work in the Portraits and Explorations albums with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. Leonard’s orchestration in the “After” version complements perfectly what Evans and the rhythm section had improvised in the “Before.” The lily is enhanced by the gilding as Leonard harmonizes Evans’ solo for flutes and piccolo, with the improvised piano line in the lead. It is a moment of absolute beauty.

For further appreciation of Mickey Leonard, see this 2011 Will Friedwald article in the online Wall Street Journal.

Article 235, section 17-a of the Web Logger Handbook:

When other duties preclude blogging, inspiration flags or the dog days of summer make you listless and you haven’t posted lately, just tap dance or play a drum solo.

How about both. And how about if I get someone else to do them.

Fred Astaire from A Damsel in Distress, 1937.

On July 17 Lionel Ferbos broke his own record as the world’s oldest working jazz musician. The New Orleans trumpeter is now 102. Ferbos celebrated by playing a gig at the Palm Court, where he has performed for a substantial number of his ten decades. This shot of Ferbos recently won Skip Bolen the Jazz Journalists Association’s photo of the year award.

Associated Press writer Stacy Plaisance’s birthday article about Ferbos (pronounced Fair-boh) quotes him on his longevity.

“Isn’t that something?” he said. “But you know I never dreamed of that. I figured if I could go to about 50 I’d be doing good.”

To read all of Plaisance’s story, go here. For a Rifftides post about Ferbos when he was a mere 99, with a video that ends with his good advice, go here.

Bill Kirchner’s choice of Mary Ann McCall (1919-1994) as the artist to feature on his return to Jazz From The Archives (see the post below), led the Rifftides staff to search for videos of her performing. A fuzzy kinescope from 1962 may be the only one in existence. It comes from Frank Evans’ Frankly Jazz program on KTLA, the pioneering independent television station in Los Angeles. McCall shared a broadcast with The Jazz Crusaders. What survives is “After You’ve Gone” with the Crusaders rhythm section: Joe Sample, piano; Victor Gaskin, bass; and Stix Hooper, drums. It is a short, perfect example of McCall’s intonation, phrasing and impeccable time. After a brief interview, the excerpt ends with the Crusaders playing a blues over credits. The tenor saxophonist is Wilton Felder, the trombonist Wayne Henderson.

Have a good weekend.

This week, jazz lost two artists who made substantial contributions to the music. The vibraharpist Peter Appleyard was one of Canada’s best known jazz musicians. Laurie Frink was a New York jazz community insider, honored as a masterly lead trumpeter, revered as a teacher. Born in England in 1928, Appleyard (pictured left) moved to Canada in his early twenties, established himself in Toronto’s jazz community and became a popular figure on Canadian television. He toured for nearly a decade as a featured soloist with Benny Goodman’s band. Go here for an obituary.

Ms. Frink, born in 1951, excelled as a trumpeter and as a teacher of trumpeters. In addition to her jazz brass section work with Benny Goodman, Maria Schneider, Gerry Mulligan, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band and other bands, she was in demand in the orchestra pits of Broadway. Among her students were Dave Douglas, Randy Sandke and John McNeil. Nate Chinen’s New York Times obituary of Ms. Frink quotes Douglas as saying that getting together with her “was like a combination of therapy, gym instruction and music lesson.” To read the article, go here.

The gain: Bill Kirchner is going back on the air as a part of the Jazz From The Archives program originated by WBGO-FM in Newark, New Jersey, and streamed on the internet. After Kirchner’s move across the river to New York, his transportation needs resulted in his leaving the show in January. As he explains in his announcement, that situation has changed. His first program of the new era is about a splendid singer seldom heard these days:

Well, with a lotta help from two engineer friends, I’m back in the broadcasting saddle again. Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for Jazz From The Archives. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).

Mary Ann McCall (1919-1994) is one of the nearly-forgotten great jazz singers. She had her greatest moment of fame in 1948-1949 with Woody Herman’s Second Herd. She then recorded four obscure albums before spending the rest of her career in Los Angeles, bartending and occasionally singing in airport lounges.

We’ll hear McCall with the Herman big band, and then on a 1958 album with an all-star rhythm section (Mal Waldron, Jimmy Raney, Oscar Pettiford, Jerry Segal) alternating with a chamber quartet (Walter Trampler, Charles McCracken, Raney, and George Duvivier) arranged by Bob Brookmeyer, Teddy Charles, Raney, and Bill Russo.

To fill out the hour, there will be two selections by the fine jazz-influenced cabaret singer (and Benny Carter protégée) Felicia Sanders (1922-1975).

The show will air this Sunday, July 21, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.

NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at http://www.wbgo.org/.

For many years, among the Other Places on the Rifftides blogroll has been Jason Crane’s The Jazz Session. Crane uses his radio experience, knowledge of music and focused curiosity to help readers and listeners understand jazz and jazz musicians. That is, he did until a few months ago when circumstances ended five years of The Jazz Session. The program had guests—hundreds of them—as varied as Maria Schneider, Sonny Rollins, Marian McPartland, Wadada Leo Smith, Terry Gibbs, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Darcy James Argue. Now, Crane is planning a comeback and asking for help by way of a Kickstarter campaign. I asked him what brought about the hiatus and why he’s going public to get the show back on the road. Here is some of his reply:

I took some time off from the show and moved from New York to Alabama for financial reasons. I loved asking questions that got beyond the mechanics and uncovered the passion, the thought, the inspiration behind the music. Why do musicians do what they do? Answering that question was at the heart of the 417 episodes that aired from 2007-2012.

In looking back at the show, I’m still convinced that finding out what inspires jazz musicians is a valuable mission, and I’d like to get back to doing that work. The show had listeners in three-dozen countries and members in two-dozen. It was downloaded more than 2.5 million times. I think that means that people find this work valuable. And that’s why I’m asking folks to support it.

When I was on Crane’s show a few years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed Jason’s company and the experience. Each time I’ve heard The Jazz Session, I have learned from him and his guests. Crane’s page at the Kickstarter website (that’s a link) has a video of his pitch and details about the campaign.

Most of the obituaries of Leonard Garment mention his background as a jazz musician but not the key role he played in arranging White House honors for Duke Ellington. The former White House adviser died July 13 at the age of 89. Garment’s clarinet and tenor saxophone skills helped pay his way through college and law school. His gigs included a stint in Woody Herman’s saxophone section, but he opted for a career in law and public service. For a full review of Garment’s career, see his New York Times obituary.

Before Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he and Garment were partners in a Washington, DC, law firm. After Nixon’s election, Garment served in the White House as a special consultant on, among other matters, civil rights and the arts. His most visible role was defending Nixon in the Watergate scandal that erupted in 1972 and in the impeachment process that led to the president’s resignation. Noted for his integrity, Garment convinced Nixon not to destroy the oval office tapes that proved damning in the Senate Watergate hearings and investigation. Ultimately, he played a key role in persuading the president that he must resign.

Early in Nixon’s term, Willis Conover of the Voice of America suggested that the president throw Ellington a 70th birthday party at the White House. Garment and fellow Nixon adviser Charles McWhorter got the president’s approval. Conover assembled an all-star tribute band: Bill Berry and Clark Terry, trumpets; Urbie Green and J.J. Johnson, trombones; Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, saxophones; Hank Jones, piano; Jim Hall, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Louie Bellson, drums; Joe Williams and Mary Mayo, vocals. Dave Brubeck, Earl Hines, Willie the Lion Smith and Billy Taylor also played. Conover MCed the concert that followed Nixon’s presentation to Ellington of the National Medal of Freedom. The President then accompanied the birthday singalong. The US Information Agency, when there still was a USIA, filmed the event. This clip from an unnamed documentary is all that I have been able to turn up.

Following the concert, the East Room was cleared of chairs. Mr. and Mrs. Nixon retired but invited everyone to stay and enjoy themselves, which many did until 2:45 a.m. A jam session developed. Some of it is described in my notes for the CD of the music released 33 years later, including Garment’s part in it.

During the session, all of the pianists from the concert reappeared. Marian McPartland, Leonard Feather and George Wein also played the East Room Steinway. McPartland joined the Lion in a duet. Billy Eckstine, Joe Wiliams and Lou Rawls traded blues choruses. Leonard Garment, once a tenor saxophonist with Woody Herman, found himself jamming on clarinet with Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Urbie Green and Dizzy Gillespie. In his book Crazy Rhythm, he wrote,

Years would pass before Benny Goodman would forgive me for not instructing him to bring his horn, but if he played, how could I?

Most of the all-stars sat in, and so did the Navy musicians. At one point, the rhythm section was made up of Marines, looking in their scarlet tunics like a contingent of Canadian Mounties.

There has been nothing like it at the White house—or anywhere else—since.

In his last two decades, Garment devoted much of his time and energy to establishment of the National Museum of Jazz in Harlem. He was its chairman until 2005.

Today is the 10th anniversary of Terry Teachout’s weblog About Last Night. For much longer than his digital decade, I have been amazed by the quantity, quality and insightfulness of Terry’s work on the web, in The Wall Street Journal, in Commentary and in his books (his biography of Duke Ellington is on the verge of publication). No one can be that prolific, that fast, that accurate, that concise, that good a writer. But he is. I would be offering him hearty congratulations even if he hadn’t been the one who encouraged and inspired me to start Rifftides eight (!) years ago. In his reflections on the first ten years, he writes,

I’ve posted something–if only an almanac entry–every weekday for a decade. Sometimes it’s a burden, but mostly it’s a pleasure.

It’s always a pleasure to read Terry, and to learn from him. I look forward to his next decade.

The light response stimulated by the news of Bengt Hallberg’s death was puzzling. Go here for the Rifftides post about the great Swedish pianist. In his later years, Hallberg used restraint and conservatism that sometimes disappointed listeners who became devoted to him for his refined bebop sensibility of the 1950s. Nonetheless, he never played with less than intriguing harmonic ingenuity and the rhythmic flow that distinguished his work from the beginning. Those unfamiliar with Hallberg’s work will find revelations in volume 7 of Svensk Jazzhistoria, Caprice Records’ massive survey of Swedish jazz from 1943 to 1969. In a 2001 Jazz Times review, I wrote about Hallberg’s work in the album.

Eleven of the album’s 65 tracks feature Hallberg as leader, arranger or sideman and together constitute perhaps the most complete disclosure under one cover of the extent of his talent. A pianist admired in Europe and the US for his fluency, touch and harmonic acuity, he wrote music with the same sense of discovery that he brought to his solos. His 1953 concert recording of “All the Things You Are” shows how completely Hallberg understood and absorbed postwar jazz developments and blended them into the cool classicism of his piano style. His 1954 “Blue Grapes,” for an octet, is a meld of blues sonorities, folk harmonies and a stately, almost baroque, sense of calm.

Further surprises and satisfactions concerning Hallberg meet our eyes and ears in video of a 1967 rehearsal for an NDR (North German Broadcasting) Jazzworkshop concert. The band is the cream of the Swedish jazz community of the day: Bosse Broberg, trumpet; Palle Mikkelborg (Danish), trumpet & fluegelhorn; Ake Persson, trombone; Lennart Aberg, tenor sax; Arne Domnérus, alto sax; Erik Nilsson, baritone sax; Rune Gustafson, guitar; Bengt Hallberg, piano; Georg Riedel, bass; Egil Johannsen, drums.

The pieces they play are, in this order, “Gubben und Källinge” (Riedel); ‘Vals” (Hallberg); “Ad Libitum” (Riedel); “Refrain” (Hallberg); “Hanid,” which is the 1925 hit “Dinah” (Axt, Lewis, Young) spelled backward; and “Django” (John Lewis). In the last two pieces, Hallberg gives full rein to his arranging craftsmanship and imagination. At the keyboard, he frees his inner Cecil Taylor. It is not our custom to embed long videos, but this was irresistible. If you understand Swedish, that’s all to the good, but you won’t need it to get the drift of the music and musicianship of Bengt Hallberg and his friends.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (it was called New Orleans) I took a break from two television and several radio newscasts a day and also broadcast a weekly program called Jazz Review. It did what the name suggests. Once in a while I deep-sixed the review format and put together a special called “It’s All Music.” The show might consist of recordings by artists as diverse as Charlie Parker, Waylon Jennings, Spike Jones, Percy Sledge, Artur Rubenstein, Jo Stafford, the Juilliard String Quartet and Frank Sinatra. Once I played the entire second movement of Mahler’s 6th Symphony. I did the first “It’s All Music” with trepidation. It turned out that the listeners—and the sponsor— liked it and asked for more. There’s no percentage in assuming that people are not open-minded.

All of that came to mind today when I got a notice that my newest follower on Twitter is the composer Daron Hagen (pictured). Anyone familiar with Hagen’s music is aware that he is open-minded. The eclecticism of his work, from chamber music to grand opera, makes that clear. You can find out about him on his website. But this isn’t about Daron, who—full disclosure—is a friend. It’s about a singing group and a piece of their music I found on YouTube when I followed a link in one of Hagen’s tweets. The group is New York Polyphony. The music is a liturgical work by the 16th century English composer William Byrd. Maybe it struck me because I recently finished reading Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall about the exploits of Henry The Eighth and Ann Boleyn during Byrd’s time. Or maybe it’s because the singing in this short piece is so good and the harmonies are so rich. I thought that you’d enjoy it, too.

It’s all music.

In the right column and for a while directly below, you will find the latest batch of Doug’s Picks: two new CDs, a classic album on CD at last, a DVD documentary about a giant of the piano who should not be forgotten, and a book that examines non-musical factors in the evolution of jazz. As always, reader comments are welcome by way of the “Speak Your Mind” box at the end of each post or the “Contact” button on the blue stripe.