Readers of Safford Chamberlain’s An Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh–indeed, anyone interested in that staunch individualist among saxophonists–will want to investigate The Warne Marsh Site. The web pages developed by Rifftides reader Jack Goodwin include a thorough discography, a news section, photographs and a page called Global Warne-ing in which afficionados around the world exchange Marsh anecdotes and listening experiences.
The discography begins with a trio recording Marsh made at age fifteen with thirteen-year-old André Previn playing piano. It ends with a session three days before he died in 1987.
To sample Marsh’s latterday playing, see him in this video clip with Sal Mosca, Eddie Gomez and Kenny Clarke.

Terry Teachout, our favorite polymath arts blogger, has cleaned out and reorganized his clearinghouse of cultural blogs and websites, to my knowledge the most extensive such guide on the internet. It’s worth a look. For TT’s preamble to the revision, go here.
When you see the extent of his choices, it will be tempting to spend the rest of your life with Terry, but please come back.

Rifftides reader Don Emanuel alerted us to video of Supersax nineteen years ago at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. The band organized by Med Flory was devoted to Charlie Parker solos transcribed and harmonized for a saxophone section. It played them with accuracy and feeling that gave their treatment of Bird’s inventions a sense of improvised sponaneity. Often, a guest trumpeter was aboard to create new solos and provide contrast. Conte Candoli was on several Supersax recordings. In this case, the trumpet soloist is Steve Hufstetter.
The saxophonists, from screen left to right, are Jay Migliori, Ray Reed, Med Flory and Lanny Morgan. Baritone saxophonist Jack Nimitz is missing. The rhythm section is Lou Levy, piano; Monty Budwig, bass; and Larance Marable, drums. Supersax has had many imitators, but the original was best, and this is a rare opportunity to see them in performance. The song is “Just Friends.”

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.–Charlie Parker

If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.–Charles Mingus

In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I told of having heard Desmond’s “Take Five” on a music box in a Prague gift shop and in a number of other unlikely places including the Mexico City subway and my neighborhood gas station.

There are sheet music arrangements of “Take Five” for solo piano, brass band, chorus, accordian, guitar, flute choir, string orchestra, drum and percussion and–I swear–hand bells.

To the list of unusual performances of “Take Five” you may now add the 12 Girls Band live at Budokan. The short solo beginning a minute and four seconds into the performance seems truly improvised. As I watched this, I imagined Desmond’s grin if he could see it.
Thanks to Iola Brubeck for pointing out this treasure.

A message from Bill Crow:

Here’s a YouTube video I found, of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in Rome, 1959,
playing my tune.

Bill Crow

The composer is featured on bass. The trumpeter is Art Farmer, the drummer Dave Bailey. The Chinese Shadow Show effect is interesting. Just try to disregard the venetian-blind video and enjoy one of Mulligan’s greatest quartets playing Mr. Crow’s intriguing blues waltz.
While you’re in YouTube territory, why not listen to the same group on the same occasion playing Mulligan’s “Spring is Sprung,” a blues of another color.

Frances Lynne, Remember (SSJ).
Often discussed but seldom heard, Ms. Lynne is a charming singer. She worked with Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond and Norman Bates in 1948. Recalling their time with her at the Geary Cellar and the Band Box, all of them told me that they were moved by her clarity, phrasing, feeling and interpretation of lyrics. She went on to sing, but not record, with the Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa bands and kept on singing after she married trumpeter John Coppola, a veteran of the Barnet, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands. Finally, in 1991, she recorded for their private label, Lark, with Coppola’s medium-sized orchestra, which included strings and French horn. The album had virtually no distribution when it was released in 1999 and still has little, but it has been nicely repackaged by the Japanese label SSJ and is available from at least one web site (click on the link in the title above).
Ms. Lynne includes the seldom-heard verses of several songs. In his liner note message, Brubeck tells her that at the Band Box “there were many times you gave me goosebumps.” It may have been singing like her treatment of the verses of Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and the Oscar Hammerstein’s-Jerome Kern song “Can I Forget You?” that affected him. The CD is all the more precious for the presence of a pair of rarities, Kern’s “The Touch of Your Hand” and Harry Warren’s “Spring Isn’t Everything,” beautifully sung by Ms. Lynne. The superb arrangements of a dozen classic songs are by Mike Abene, who also conducts. The classy bass and drums are by Bill Douglass and Eddie Marshall. Soloists are Abene on piano, trumpeters Coppola and Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist John Handy and–on alto sax and clarinet–Herbie Steward, one of the original Four Brothers of the Woody Herman Second Herd. Their vigor complements Ms. Lynne’s restraint and mature wistfulness. For most of us, Frances Lynne’s singing was mythical. This CD brings it happily to life.
For an account of the Geary Cellar-Band Box milieu long before there was a Dave Brubeck Quartet, see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

Rifftides reader Peter Luce has a question:

I’m wondering if someone in Rifftides’ knowledgeable readership can help clarify some conflicting information I’ve read about Ellington’s used of trumpet, trombone and clarinet in the original recording of “Mood Indigo.” John Edward Hasse, in The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, writes:
“Ellington turned on their heads the usual roles of trombone, trumpet and clarinet, assigning the trombone the high notes and the clarinet the low.”
Alyn Shipton in A New History of Jazz writes:
“Whereas in the traditional order of things, the clarinet would take the upper part, the trombone the lower, with the trumpet in the middle, [Ellington] assigned the highest notes to the muted trumpet, the central part to a muted high-register trombone, and the lowest notes to a clarinet in its deep chalumeau register.”
Both of these jazz historians agree that the clarinet was assigned the low parts, but clearly disagree on the trumpet and trombone. Can any of your readers shed any light?

We have in the audience arrangers, composers, musicologists and other listeners with big ears. Click the link above, listen, send your answers to Mr. Luce’s query and we will post them.

Graham Collier, Hoarded Dreams (Cuneiform). Here we have further, but not recent , adventures of the pioneering British composer, arranger and leader. Hoarded Dreams is a seven-part suite commissioned by the Bracknell Jazz Festival in 1983. Following its one performance by a band of European stars plus trumpeters Kenny Wheeler (Canadian) and Ted Curson (American), the music has languished in a tape archive for twenty-four years. Collier is in a league with George Russell and Charles Mingus in the demanding discipline of writing for large ensembles populated by musicians whose improvisation goes beyond the fringe of standard harmony.

Graham Collier
The looseness and cogency in Collier’s arrangements are in ideal balance to contain the wildness, daring and–it must be emphasized–good humor of the soloists. There is no trace of the anger and willfull distortion that marred so much avant garde playing in the final decades of the twentieth century. The quality of solos and interchanges by familiar players like Curson, Wheeler, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and the baritone sax powerhouse John Surman is equaled by musicians who deserve to be better known outside the British Isles. Among them are guitarist Ed Speight, drummer Ashley Brown, tenor saxophonist Art Themen and trombonist Conny Bauer. Bauer manages to combine elements of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd, to startling effect. There is so much happening in this music, I suggest that you give it two or three hearings to begin to absorb its dynamics, complexity and subtlety and to sort out which parts are written and which improvised. It’s worth your time. For thoughts on a previous release by Collier, go here.

(An annual Rifftides reminder)
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.–Benjamin Franklin
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.–Abraham Lincoln

André Previn, Alone (Emarcy). When in the mid-1960s Previn committed himself to classical conducting, composing and performing, he did not leave jazz behind. Technique, taste and touch intact, he plays thirteen pieces using his range of dynamics, rhythmic subtlety, harmonic sensibility and capacity for surprise. He recalls a lick or two from his period of intense jazz involvement in the 1950s, but the greater interest here is Previn’s depth of exploration within the chord structures of familiar songs including “Angel Eyes,” “Skylark” and “It Might As Well Be Spring.”
In a lovely moment in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” he sets up tension with riff-like repetition then provides release with a key change. His abstract treatment of “I Can’t Get Started” encompasses passages of the lightning finger work that reflects his classical background. The repertoire includes an original blues; “Darkest Before The Dawn,” a Previn collaboration with Johnny Mercer; and Previn’s 1966 hit song “You’re Gonna Hear From Me.” If the last title implies further solo adventures, they will be welcome. This is Previn’s best solo album since his 1960 Harold Arlen collection.

Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond in duo were one of the great treats of the seventies even as Desmond contended with the lung cancer that was soon to end his life. Someone caught one of their reunions on tape–a short blues performance culminating in the “Audrey” or “Balcony Rock” melody that they favored for more than a quarter of a century. This is another example of why Desmond said that Brubeck was his ideal accompanist.

If you are planning on attending the Newport Jazz Festival, keep in mind that it is no longer held over the Fourth of July weekend but in the second weekend in August. For a rundown on this year’s event, go here. For a three-CD compilation scanning the festival’s fifty-one-year history, try this boxed set. You’ll find a wide range of performances from Louis Armstrong’s “Tin Roof Blues” to John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” Among the treasures are the famous Duke Ellington “Dimineundo in Blue” with Paul Gonsalves’ marathon tenor sax solo, Sarah Vaughan’s “Black Coffee,” the Dizzy Gillespie big band with “I Remember Clifford” and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s piquant version of Ellington’s “Jump For Joy.”

Over the next few postings, the Rifftides staff will attempt the impossible–to catch up with recordings. The best I can do is single out a few and offer observations in hopes that they will provide Rifftiders guideposts as they decide which CDs in the endless stream are worth their time and money. The observations will be brief. This time, three saxophonists:
Michael Brecker, Pilgrimage (Heads Up). With his disease in what turned out to be temporary remission, six months before he died Brecker played like a man who had found new life. He put himself in the studio with five musicians he adored–Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, John Patitucci and Jack DeJohnette–and delivered power, humor and unremitting creativity. The swaggering “Tumbleweed” is a hoot. But, then, so is the whole album. What a goodbye.
Zoot Sims Plays Tenor & 4 Altos (Fresh Sound). The release date is a few days away, but you may want to get in line now. Zoot Sims Plays 4 Altos all but evaporated as an LP a few years after its release in 1957. Devotees of Sims and George Handy have been clamoring for its reissue ever since. Mint copies of the LP have sold well into three figures. Based on Sims’ initial improvisation, Handy brilliantly scored arrangements for four alto saxophones. Sims then overdubbed the additional three parts. It was a thoroughly musical tour de force. The CD also includes the 1956 album Zoot!, with Sims on alto and his mainstay tenor, one horn at a time. Handy plays piano on both albums. Trumpeter Nick Travis, bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Osie Johnson are on Zoot! Knobby Totah and Nick Stabulas are the bassist and drummer on 4 Altos. This is a reissue event.
Clifford Jordan in the World (Strata-East). On CD at last, this 1969 recording follows up the late tenor saxophonist’s Glass Bead Games. It doesn’t have quite the cohesive sweep of that equally rare recording, but it has Jordan at a high level matched by sidemen Kenny Dorham, Don Cherry, Julian Priester, Wynton Kelly, Wilbur Ware, Richard Davis and Albert “Tootie” Heath–an eminent cast of adventurers finding the sweet spot between bebop and free jazz. It is further proof, if proof is needed, that Jordan was one of the great tenor men.
The next few days will include a business trip. I’ll try to work in a few more in this series of CD alerts

Generally, I’m against exclamation points. The one in the headline is a justified exception.
If you miss Art Farmer as much as I do, follow this link. The YouTube information line tells you that the rhythm section is Ray Brown, Jacky Terrason and Alvin Queen. It doesn’t tell you that the tune is Charlie Parker’s “Moose the Mooche,” that Art, late in his life, was playing with enormous beauty and power, or that Ray Brown was the boss of the bass. If the shape-shifting video bothers you, close your eyes. This is a gem.

Anat Cohen has not quite taken New York by storm. In this culture, only rock stars or politicians who campaign like rock stars do that. But Cohen has established herself in the jazz capital of the world as one of the bright new reed artists. The story of her becoming a jazz musician in Tel Aviv, her musical brothers, and substantial samples of her music occupied a sizeable chunk of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday. To hear Liane Hansen’s feature on Anat Cohen, go here.

I value the decades I spent in television news. Helping people to understand the events and issues of the day was important work that brought satisfaction and, at its best, promoted the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry. Now from the Society of Professional Journalists come two items about the state of broadcast journalism that are enough to embarrass me on behalf of the profession, or craft, and make my teeth hurt. I hope these travesties move news consumers in Tyler, Texas, and Portland, Maine, to demand corrective action, but my guess is that the line between news and entertainment has been so thoroughly plowed under that audiences don’t see anything amiss. Viewers have been conditioned by local and national television and cable news to accept a standard of professionalism dominated by the ethics of beauty contests and show business promoters.
Here is the first item, from SPJ’s electronic newsletter :

BOOB TUBE? A television station in Tyler, Texas, has a beauty pagaent queen with no journalism experience anchoring a news show. The woman’s experiences are being chronicled for a reality television program titled, “Anchorwoman.” Cary Darling of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported SPJ President Christine Tatum’s reaction to the station’s hiring decision.

Next: This item from Tatum’s own newsletter. Be sure to follow her link to the television news staff’s promotion of a movie. The first time I watched it, I thought it was a gag, a parody. The second time, I shouted bad words at the screen.

Then, there’s the news team at WGME in Portland, Maine, which appears in one of the biggest assaults on journalism integrity ever to hit the silver screen. But, hey, I give them credit for managing to promote a theater and their newscast while also directing moviegoers to turn off their cell phones and pick up their trash. That takes real talent!
Wake up, people. You’re harming journalism — and looking fabulous as you do so.

I don’t know who the news director is at WGME, but the Radio Television News Directors Association does. The RTNDA should reprimand him or her and the news director at KYTX in Tyler for their breaches of professional standards and for further disillusioning Americans about the reliability of broadcast news.

I used an hour and a half of the fifteen-and-a-half hours of daylight on this first day of summer for a morning ride on the Bianchi.The bike took me (with a little help) up a series of hills, past the golf courses and expensive housing developments that are pushing farms farther out from town and up the western slopes of the valley. Never fear, however; there are plenty of orchards left. If what I saw this morning is an indication, the world can expect an abundance of Washington applesnext fall, regardless of competition from China and New Zealand. By the time I got onto the roads out in orchard country, what passes for rush hour traffic around here was down to a car every four or five minutes. It was a peaceful place to start the day.

A recent reimmersion in things Tristano led to the mini-review of the Warne Marsh book in the latest batch of Doug’s Picks (right-hand column). It included several viewings of a video of Lennie Tristano’s quintet at the Half Note in 1964. The picture quality may have been fine originally, but it appears to have been through several generations of dubs. No matter; the sound is reasonably good. Through the murk you get a tour of the beloved Half Note in the days when folks dressed to go out in the evening. Those strips of cloth you will see on the mens’ shirtfronts were called neckties.
In this ten-minute clip, the bartender we glimpse now and then is Mike Canterino. He and his brother Sonny manned the bar. Their father may have had a formal name but his family and the customers called him Pop. He and Mamma took care of the kitchen. The word pasta never crossed Pop’s lips; it was spaghetti. The uncomplicated menu gave jazz club food a good name, a major accomplishment. Mike’s wife Judi and Sonny’s wife Tita helped out. Judi became a singer after James Moody recruited her one night to sing the Blossom Dearie bridge on “Moody’s Mood For Love.” Al the waiter completed the staff. In its original incarnation, the Half Note was among the warehouses and garages of lower Manhattan. In the seventies, the club moved uptown, lost its soul and died.
Tristano often played at the Half Note. To see and hear him, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Sonny Dallas and Nick Stabulas, click here. The piece they’re playing is “312 E. 32nd,” Tristano’s reimagination of “Out of Nowhere.”
For a lovely remembrance of the Half Note by Dave Frishberg, who often played there, go here. Dave paints splendid pictures of Al the waiter and of Mr. George, a dedicated customer for whom Al Cohn named a tune. For Mike Canterino’s story of the night Judy Garland came in, go here.