The Miguel Zenon Quartet with Luis Perdomo, piano; Hans Glawischnig, bass; and Henry Cole, drums, play “"¿Que Sera de Puerto Rico?” in 2009 at the Teatro Central de Sevilla, Spain. This was the year following Zenon's winning one of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships … [Read more...]

In what may have been her motion picture debut, here is Ella Fizgerald at 25 in the 1942 Abbott and Costello comedy Ride ‘Em Cowboy. With her in the sequence are the Merry Macs singing and the Lindy Hoppers lindy-hopping. This was at about the time she had stopped fronting the Chick Webb band and … [Read more...]

Rifftides Reader Andrew Dowd writes: You may recall me as the fellow who hosts a jazz show on KMHD in Portland OR, on Saturday nights. A few weeks ago I got out an old dusty copy of The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Jazz Goes to Junior College, (Columbia CL1034, 1957), that I had in my collection … [Read more...]

Intial reports that Snooky Young died on May 5 were in error. He died on Wednesday, May 11, at home in Newport Beach, California. He was 92. The cause of death was a lung disease that developed recently. Young was that rare combination, a great lead trumpeter who was also a soloist of exceptional … [Read more...]

In January, after looking over the lineup for this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which was laden with rock and pop, I wrote: More than five years after Katrina, with the city recovering but much of it still resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival … [Read more...]

A Rifftides archive browser who identifies himself only as Hank wrote to take me to task: I feel certain you are friends with Miller Williams. My main comment is that if you are going to publish online his poetry, it seems you would want to get it right. There are numerous errors in the … [Read more...]

Lately, readers have asked how to sign up for Rifftides RSS feeds and be notified of new posts and comments. On the right side of the blue bar at the top of the screen, you will see a pair of symbols like this. Click on the one next to "Posts" or the one next to "Comments," or both, and then click … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader Debra Kinzler’s notice that a quartet of Clifford Jordan's admirers will revive his Glass Bead Games prompts me to post a slightly revised version of a 2007 piece about a landmark recording that became unavailable for too long. Ms. Kinzler informs us that tenor saxophonist Seamus … [Read more...]

Five years ago, I wrote about Tom Sancton’s book Song For My Fathers being assigned reading for Tulane University’s incoming students. That venerable school chose it to give the freshmen a shared intellectual experience that would stimulate discussion. Not incidentally, it would also acquaint … [Read more...]

This is the latest of our periodic efforts to keep up with recorded music. Some of these CDs are recent. Some have been languishing in the holding pen for months. Some are timeless standard repertoire items that the Rifftides staff believes everyone should know about. The album titles in blue … [Read more...]

Several days ago in the course of conducting a web search, Vicki Overfelt came across a 2008 Rifftides mini-review of a Rosa Passos album, Romance. She used the comment function to ask if anyone could help her find the object of her search. She wanted the words to “Desilusión,” a song Passos … [Read more...]

The animated digital robot spoofs springing up on the internet include several aimed at the jazz-insider culture, in particular at the hipper-than-thou talk exchanged among students of the art who may be ever so slightly over-educated and just too cool—but not too cool for words. There are … [Read more...]

Trummy Young and Johnny Mercer wrote “Travelin’ Light.” Billie Holiday owned it. This version with an unidentified pianist was made in Paris in 1959, the year she died. It is one of her most affecting treatments of a song that became one of her signature pieces. For more about Billie and … [Read more...]

The logical followup to the piece below about Chris Byars' hero Lucky Thompson is a piece by Thompson. Here's a film from Paris in 1959 at the Blue Note. The rhythm section is Bud Powell, piano; Pierre Michelot, bass; Jimmy Gourley, guitar; Kenny Clarke, drums. The compostion is Dizzy Gillespie's … [Read more...]

Chris Byars, Lucky Strikes Again (Steeplechase). This album by a gifted saxophonist, composer and arranger has several things to recommend it. ï‚—It presents 10 pieces written and arranged by Lucky Thompson (1924-2005), a saxophonist whose brilliance and originality as a player and writer … [Read more...]

Tony Emmerson's blog Prague Jazz has come out of hibernation after several months of dormancy. It was, and presumably again will be, a prime source of information about music in one of eastern Europe's great centers of culture. The main re-entry item is an interview with saxophonist Julian Nicholas, … [Read more...]