Miroslav Vitous, Live In Vienna (MVD Visual). Another in the series of bassists playing at Porgy & Bess in Vienna. This time the star is Vitous, an erstwhile wunderkind of the double bass who arrived in New York from Czechoslovakia in the late sixties and quickly installed himself in the US jazz scene. After concentrating on his role as an educator, he is again in heavy performance mode. In this concert, Vitous applies his formidable gifts to a range of music including Beethoven, Dvorak, Jewish melody, opera fragments, a lyrical ballad, free improvisation and straight-ahead jazz reflecting his days with Miles Davis. This is a solo bass recital. Despite the claim of the minimal liner notes that Vitous is accompanied by pianist Fritz Pauer and drummer John Hollenbeck, they are nowhere to be seen or heard.

Andy Hamilton, Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (Michigan). Unlike the overwhelming majority of books made up of verbatim interviews, this one works. Konitz’s disarming candor about himself and others and Hamilton’s organizational and writing skills transcend the form to create a balanced portrait of the alto saxophonist, one of the great individualists in jazz. Hamilton’s transitions, insights, and interviews about Konitz with other musicians help make the book a success.

Sue Raney, Heart’s Desire: A Tribute To Doris Day (Fresh Sound). After too long, a new collection by a magnificent singer. See this Rifftides review for details.

Tom Harrell, Light On (High Note). Another artist who takes his time between releases, the trumpeter and uncompromising composer is worth waiting for. Light On has nine new Harrell tunes, his deep solo explorations, the muscularity of Wayne Escoffery’s tenor saxophone and a fine young rhythm section. The intriguing “Sky Life” could capture the kind of attention Harrell achieved eighteen years ago with “Sail Away,” his most famous composition.

Logan Richardson, Cerebral Flow (Fresh Sound New Talent). A twenty-seven-year-old Kansas Citian now living in New York, Richardson is an alto and soprano saxophonist with a song-like approach to improvisation, even at his edgiest. He and his equally adventurous quintet colleagues sustain interest through their interaction on ten pieces Richardson composed or, in the cases of “Animated Concept of Being” and “Free the Blues,” conjured as urgent pas de deux for himself and drummers Nasheet Waits and Thomas Crane. His “Urban Folk Song” is a highlight. Vibraphonist Mike Pinto, guitarist Mike Moreno and bassist Matthew Brewer, like Richardson representatives of New York’s yeasty new downtown jazz scene, function more as equal partners than as sidemen.

Miroslav Vitous, Live in Vienna (MVD Visual, Quantum Leap). Another in the Quantum Leap series featuring bassists in club performance at Vienna’s Porgy and Bess. This time, it’s Vitous, the Czech bassist who materialized in New York in 1967 and quickly became embedded with leading players in the US jazz scene. He was one of the founders of Weather Report. Now a veteran solo concertizer, his repertoire in this concert reflects his eclecticism with variations on Beethoven, Dvorak, Miles Davis, Victor Young and Jewish music, not to mention a pastiche of opera themes. Pianist Fritz Pauer and drummer John Hollenbeck–Porgy and Bess regulars–support Vitous with their customary attentiveness.

Max Wilk, They’re Playing Our Song (Da Capo). Wilk’s survey of classic songwriters doesn’t have the wisdom and analysis of Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song. Still it’s a minor classic full of wonderful anecdotes about two dozen of the people who brought you the great American songbook, among them Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Fields, Mercer, Duke, Rogers and Styne.

Bill Charlap Trio, Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note). Pianist Charlap, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington, the most publicized mainstream jazz trio of the decade, live up to their billing. Managing smoothness without sacrificing depth and daring, Charlap illuminates the Birth Of The Cool classics “Rocker” and “Godchild” and blazes through “My Shining Hour.” He caresses “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “All Across the City” in versions as remarkable for their slowness as for their beauty. The Washingtons deliver power and finesse in support and in solo.

Darrell Grant, Truth And Reconciliation (Origin). With bassist John Pattitucci and drummer Brian Blade giving him solid underpinning throughout, pianist Grant includes four guest soloists in this two-CD profession of his humanist philosophy. He brings in the recorded voices of Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela. He sings his “When I See the Water” in an agreeable pop-gospel style and narrates another original, “The Geography of Hope.” Beyond the message–or within it–is solid improvisation by Grant, guitarists Bill Frisell and Adam Rogers, saxophonist Steve Wilson and vibraphonist Joe Locke. There’s a knockout trio version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Algo Bueno,” aka “Woody’n You.”

Kristin Korb, Live in Vienna (Quantum Leap). Jay Leonhart wrote a song called “It’s Impossible to Sing and Play the Bass.” Kristin Korb didn’t get the message. This video disc recorded at Vienna’s Porgy and Bess presents Korb in a trio with club regulars pianist Fritz Pauer and drummer John Hollenbeck. The promotional blurb evoking Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald places a heavy load on her, but Korb justifies the hyperbole with musicianship and leadership. Her singing, bass playing and rapport with her sidemen and the audience are first rate. Highlights: Neil Hefti’s “Whirly Bird” at approximately the speed of light and fine soloing by everyone on “Cheek to Cheek.”

Bud Powell, Dollar Brand, Don Cherry & Others, Jazz In Denmark (Marshmallow). The centerpiece of this limited edition import is Stopforbud, a film about Powell made in 1962 by a pair of young Danes. Powell’s piano is heard throughout, although we only briefly see him playing. With a New Wave sensibility, the camera follows Powell as he wanders through a park, the streets of Copenhagen, a museum and a trash dump. Dexter Gordon narrates. The music is previously unreleased trio performances by Powell, bassist Niels Henning Ǿrsted-Pedersen and drummer John Elniff. It is a moody and affecting glimpse of the great pianist at a strange kind of ease. The DVD also includes club performances by the New York Contemporary Five with Don Cherry, John Tchicai and Archie Shepp in the front line, and Portrait of a Bushman, a short film about pianist Dollar Brand.

Safford Chamberlain, An Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh (Scarecrow). Researching aspects of the Lennie Tristano school recently, I unshelved Chamberlain’s biography of Marsh for the first time in years. I was impressed all over again by Chamberlain’s research, the quality of his writing and his balanced treatment of an uncompromising and compelling tenor saxophonist who could be as difficult as he was brilliant. Coincidentally, a video of Marsh performing “It’s You Or No One” with Sal Mosca, Eddie Gomez and Kenny Clarke showed up not long ago on YouTube.

The Bill Holman Band, Hommage (Jazzed Media). On the verge of his eightieth birthday, Holman retains the energy, wit, freshness and multi-layered conception that have made him a standard-setting arranger for fifty years. “Hommage á Woody,” is a three-part suite that captures aspects of Woody Herman and his bands of five decades, with Bob Efford exuberant and touching in his central role on clarinet. Holman also honors Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Tadd Dameron with brilliant variations on their work. As always, Holman’s band is loaded with impressive soloists, but there’s no doubt that the arranger is the star. The album is dedicated to the memory of Bob Enevoldsen.

Anat Cohen, Poetica and Noir (Anzica). Two new CDs illuminate several facets of the remarkable Israeli reed artist who has become a star of the New York jazz scene. In Poetica, she plays only clarinet, with a rhythm section on some tracks, a string quartet on others. In Noir, with a medium-sized band, Cohen also plays tenor, alto and soprano saxophones. On all of her horns, fullness of tone, richness of conception and joyful presence make her one of the most compelling soloists to emerge in the new century.

Roland Kirk with Jack McDuff, Kirk’s Work (Prestige). This reissue in the Rudy Van Gelder Remasters series presents Kirk long before he added “Rahsaan” to his name, before he became famous, when he was a tornado roaring out of the Midwest playing three saxophones at once, whistles, flute and siren at the ready on a chain around his neck. Kirk was organized turbulence stirring the air with music. Kirk’s Work didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved when it came out. It is one of his greatest albums.

Chicago Underground Trio, Chronicle (Delmark). The music is from the trio’s Delmark CD of the same name. The latest expression of the avant garde Chicago cornetist and composer Rob Mazurek, it is alternately explosive and reflective and somehow leaves the listener with a sense of calm. The video by Raymond Salvatore Harmon is muted, layered in shifting pastel splashes and patterns over sequences of Mazurek, percussionist Chad Taylor and bassist Jason Ajemian playing. The visual aspect is as dreamlike as the music.

Richard Cook, It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off The Record (Oxford). Yes, another book about Miles Davis. Neither a biography nor a discography, Cook’s book has elements of both. The best way to read it is sitting next to your CD player with the fourteen Davis albums Cook analyzes as points of departure in considering the trumpeter’s career and importance. It would be helpful to also have the 105 others that he references. Whether or not you do all that listening, Cook is a reliable and stimulating guide through Davis’s five decades of changing music and persona.

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet In San Francisco (Riverside). This is the 1959 recording that made Adderley and his band famous and the Riverside label a stable enterprise. It is one of five albums inititating a new series of recordings overseen by Orrin Keepnews, now well into his second half-century as a leading jazz producer. It includes previously unissued takes of “You Got It!” and of “This Here,” the hit indelibly associated with Adderley. If you have never discovered the excitement and joy Cannonball generated with his brother Nat, Bobby Timmons, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, this welcome reissue is the perfect introduction. The first batch of the Keepnews Collection reissues also has CDs by Thelonious Monk, Joe Henderson, Wes Montgomery and Kenny Dorham. Thoughts about them later. I presume that there will be more to come, from Bill Evans, for instance, George Russell, Jimmy Heath, Yusef Lateef, Clifford Jordan, Bobby Hutcherson, Mulgrew Miller and other beneficiaries of the Keepnews touch.

Jack Reilly, Pure Passion (Unichrom). In his mid-seventies, Reilly continues on his independent way as a pianist inspired by many predecessors but shaped by his own expansive harmonic vision. In several of his CDs, I have heard no more ravishing expression of that vision than in his radical, utterly gorgeous, reharmonization of the famous Dizzy Gillespie coda to Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight.” His “Das Fryderyk” reinforces my conviction that if Chopin had been born fifty years later, he would been a great blues player. This solo album contains pieces by composers including Kern, Rodgers, Victor Young, Vernon Duke and Gershwin. Its cover proclaims, “10 Standards, 6 Originals.” In Reilly’s hands, they are all original.