Pinky Winters is one of the treasures of the vocal world. I would suggest that any endeavor to locate her recorded work is well worth the effort. I am partial to Rain Sometimes, Cellar Door Records CCLR 101, recorded in 2002, also produced by Bill Reed. She is masterfully accompanied on piano by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett and the fondly-remembered Bob Maize on bass. Wonderful songs, inspired renditions … Look for it and buy it. You will thank me.
Carol Sloane

New female singers billed as jazz artists pop up these days at the rate of about two a minute. If they must pop up, I wish that they would first listen carefully to Carol Sloane and then, if they decide to persist, listen to her again. And again. Something might rub off. They could start with one of her new CDs, Whisper Sweet, for instance—or one from her early career—say, Out of the Blue.
Out of the Blue, a 1961 Columbia album, was the first under her own name. It had Bob Brookmeyer’s first string arrangements and other charts by Brookmeyer’s hero Bill Finegan. The soloists included Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, Nick Travis, Barry Galbraith and Jim Hall. The album opened with Brookmeyer’s introduction to Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss”—which amounts to a short composition—then Sloane entered with the most perfect delivery I have ever heard of that enchanting first line:

If you hear a song in blue,
like a flower crying for the dew….

Instantly, I was hooked.
Columbia never issued Out of the Blue on compact disc. Koch Jazz did, ten years ago, but the CD is out of print, inexcusably, and copies are going for nearly fifty dollars. Is it worth it? It would be to me.
But, I’m still hooked.

The Rifftides piece about pianist John Williams incorrectly identified him as a former mayor of Vero Beach, Florida. Williams sent a postcard with an aerial view of Vero Beach, where he lives now, setting the record straight.

Thanks for very generous—if unwarranted— warm words in Rifftides. But thought I should correct “mayor of Vero Beach” bit. I was City Commissioner (& vice-mayor one term) for 20 years in Hollywood, Fla. 1971-1991. Elected to 5 terms, 4 yrs. each. Did a good job. Have a nice park named after me.

The Rifftides staff regrets the error. The research assistant responsible will be forced to correct the original posting and listen to Yanni, John Tesch and George Winston for one week.
For a photograph and description of John Williams Park, go here and scroll down to the middle of the page. Where’s the statue?

After my daily journalism days ended, I spent several years educating professional journalists about issues they cover in economics, science, the environment, foreign affairs and other fields. One of our key areas at the nonprofit Foundation For American Communications (FACS) was ethics. That resulted in Journalism Ethics: Why Change? a book edited by me and my assistant Dale Shaps that is still read by reporters, editors, producers and others in journalism who know how difficult it is, day in and day out, to be balanced, accurate and fair.
Over several years, we did a series of educational conferences on ethics for journalists. The programs attracted some of the leading figures in American news organizations as students, teachers, speakers and panelists. A few of them were Richard Harwood of The Washington Post; former National News Council President Norman Isaacs; Jeff Greefield, then of ABC News; William Henry III of TIME: Bud Benjamin of CBS News: and David Lawrence, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Jesse Mann, an ethicist and philosophy professor at Georgetown University, often led the participants through thinking about moral reasoning and newsgathering. At one of our sessions, Dave Lawrence, when he was publisher of The Detroit Free Press, confessed that he hadn’t fully connected the obligation to be accurate with ethics until he was the subject of a front page profile in a national newspaper. Lawrence said that the reporter made mistakes of fact that got past the copy desk and the editors. By being on the receiving end of the news process, he said, he acquired a greater understanding of why so many readers, listeners and viewers question the reliability of what they read, see and hear in the news.
All of that came to mind when I read DevraDoWrite‘s latest installment. It had to do with her hometown newspaper’s short profile of her husband, John Levy. Devra had a David Lawrence experience. Here’s some of what she wrote:

What could have been a lovely feature story in Friday’s Pasadena Star News was, sadly, full of factual errors, and worse, it was woefully short on substance. Errors included my age — I am 50 years old, 44 years younger than John, not 55 years younger than John which would make me 39 (and no, I don’t wish it were so); and we won’t even mention that there is no jazz musician I know of named Jim Hail. Okay those are two errors that are personal to me and I’m feeling snarky, but there are many other errors and a few misquotes as well. Whether due to shoddy/sloppy journalism practices or lack of experience I can’t say for a fact, but I do have an opinion.
Even though the reporter did request (and receive) a free copy of Men, Women and Girl Singers, John’s life story written entirely by yours truly (as John himself told her), I guess she didn’t have time to read it or any of the materials on the web site. However, she did interview John for two hours, consulted twice at length with his publicist, even called me with questions, and there is so much she could have written about.

To read all of Devra’s piece, go here.
It is almost instinctual among news consumers to conclude that when errors are made in print, radio and television news, they stem from political or ideological bias. I have found in working for decades in all three media—and now in this strange new digital one—that a large majority of working journalists want to get it right and want to be fair. (The question of ethical instincts among bloggers, most of whom are not journalists, is a subject for another occasion. Maybe, someday.) An overwhelming fact of life in the daily journalism business is that in a tighter, faster, news cycle with newsroom budgets being slashed by corporate ownerships that no longer regard news as a responsibility and a privilege but as a budgetary burden, with fewer reporters and editors cranking out more news, there will be more mistakes. That excuses nothing. The professional obligation to be informed, fair and accurate is a constant.
In the preface to Journalism Ethics: Why Change? I wrote:

Consciously or not, journalists practice ethics every day of their working lives. How much time to devote to a story, whether to include a name, whether to disclose a source, what to show on the screen: these are value judgments and involve ethical decisions as surely as massive arguments over fairness, balance and maintenance of the watchdog function of the press made possible by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
To many journalists, talking about matters of fairness and ethics is akin to inviting censorshop. But unless they make conscious efforts to view those decisions in an ethical framework, journalists will not fully understand their professional obligations and opportunities.

Twenty years later, I would add that the new owners of news organizations, many of them from industries with no connection to journalism traditions, must somehow come to understand that their new corporate assets carry an obligation to more than their stockholders. They have become gatekeepers of the free flow of information upon which the democracy depends. We will all be affected by how—and whether—they accommodate the pressures of the market to that responsbility.

Bill Kirchner’s next Jazz From The Archives on WBGO, the Newark, New Jersey, jazz station, will feature the 1960s Columbia recordings of pianist Denny Zeitlin. The program will be an opportunity to hear some of Zeitlin’s important work for Columbia that has never been issued on CD. Bill will include tracks from Cathexis, Carnival, Shining Hour and Zeitgeist. The show airs Sunday night at 11:00 EDT. It may also be heard on WBGO’s live web stream at 10 p.m. Central time; 8 p.m. Pacific; 8 a.m. Monday, Paris; 10 a.m. Dubai, etc.
Tip: clicking on the “Listen Now” symbol at the upper right corner of WBGO’s screen gets you nothing. You must click on the appropriate box in the middle of the screen.
Cathexis and Carnival are on one CD. Shining Hour, also known as Live at the Trident, is out as an import CD. Zeitgeist has never made it to compact disc.
For a Rifftides essay on Zeitlin’s first recording go to this archive piece.

Jim Harrod writes concerning the Rifftides item about Pinky Winters:

I enjoyed your recent celebration of Pinky’s Mandel CD. If readers inquire where they might acquire this gem for less than $40, I would heartily recommend Early Records in Tokyo. The owner, Hiroshi Tanno, sells it for ¥2,800 and charged me ¥450 for delivery. The total was ¥3,250, translated to $28.33 and was paid via PayPal, making the transaction seamless and fast. Hiroshi can be contacted at hiroshi@earlyrecords.com

COMMENT 1
Here’s a message from Bill Crow following the recent Rifftides piece about pianist John Williams.

There is a recent release on Hep Records of a Spike Robinson CD, The C.T.S. Session, on which John is the pianist. I am the bassist, and Peter Cater of London is the drummer.Louis Stewart plays guitar on a few tracks. We made it in 1998 after our appearance at the Cork Jazz Festival, but it sat on the shelf for a few years after Spike died. Johnny Williams was a great pleasure to play with on that tour.

Thanks to Jim Wardrop for also calling the Robinson album to our attention.
COMMENT 2
The critic Larry Kart sent this:

Thanks for the heads up on that John Williams CD and the neat (sorry to sound like a ’50s teenager, but that’s the word that came to mind) profile of him. I’ve always enjoyed Williams’ playing, which was, as you say, a unique personal offshoot of his influences; no one could mistake Williams for anyone else. Percussive and rollicking, but there were times when he got so rumbustious that it seemed as though he were about to throw some furniture around the room. In that vein, he sounded to me like a modern Joe Sullivan. Wonder if Williams knew Sullivan’s stuff. Speaking of which, here’s a remarkable (I think) poem by Englishman Roy Fisher (b. 1930), who’s also a jazz pianist. It’s in his new book The Long and Short of It: Poems 1955-2005:
THE THING ABOUT JOE SULLIVAN
The pianist Joe Sullivan
jamming sound against idea
hard as it can go
florid and dangerous
slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes,
in his time almost the only
one of them to ignore
the chance of easing down,
walking it leisurely,
he’ll strut, with gambling shapes,
underpinning by James P.,
amble, and then stride over
gulfs of his own leaving, perilously
toppling octaves down to where
the chords grow fat again
and ride hard-edged, most lucidly
voiced, and in good inversions even when
the piano seems at risk of being
hammered the next second into scrap.
For all that, he won’t swing
like all the others;
disregards mere continuity,
the snakecharming business,
the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’
under the long variations:
Sullivan can gut a sequence
in one chorus–
–approach, development, climax, discard–
and sound magnanimous.
The mannerism of intensity
often with him seems true,
too much to be said, the mood
pressing in right at the start, then
running among stock forms
that could play themselves
and moving there with such
quickness of intellect
that shapes flaw and fuse,
altering without much sign,
concentration
so wrapped up in thoroughness
it can sound bluff, bustling
just big-handed stuff–
belied by what drives him in
to make rigid, display,
shout and abscond, rather
than just let it come, let it go–
And that thing is his mood:
a feeling violent and ordinary
that runs in among standard forms so
wrapped up in clarity
that fingers following his
through figures that sound obvious
find corners everywhere,
marks of invention, wakefulness;
the rapid and perverse
tracks that ordinary feelings
make when they get driven
hard enough against time.

COMMENT 3: WELLSTOOD AND SULLIVAN
When Dick Wellstood was a young man beginning to play piano around New York in the mid-1940s, he was so thoroughly under Sullivan’s spell that he handed out business cards reading, “Perhaps you can help me to meet Joe Sullivan. My name is Dick Wellstood.” With a tip from cornetist Muggsy Spanier, he finally did meet Sullivan. The story, told by clarinetist Kenny Davern, is in Edward N. Meyer’s valuable biography of Wellstood, Giant Strides.

Mugsy looked at him and said, “Well, he lives right around the corner.” Muggsy gave him the number and said, “Why don’t you knock on the door and tell him Muggsy sent you, as a way of introduction, kid.” So Dick said, “Are you sure it’s not too late?” He looked at his watch. It was 1:30 in the morning and Muiggsy said, “Oh, no, no. Sullivan is up all the time, he’s up at all hours.
So Dick goes over there and rings the doorbell. Soon this disheveled figure in slippers and a bathrobe comes shuffling through. Joe opens the door and says, “Yeah?” Dick says, “Hi, my name is Dick Wellstood and Muggsy Spanier said to say hello.” And Joe Sullivan said, “Tell Muggsy Spanier to go f____ himself,” and slammed the door right in Dick’s face.

There is a reasonably comprehensive short biography of Sullilvan on the Red Hot Jazz website, and a batch of MP3 tracks of his playing. They include Gin Mill Blues and Little Rock Getaway, two of his most famous—and most imitated—recordings. This CD has those tracks and twenty-two others from 1933 to 1941.
COMMENTS 4 & 5: WILLIAMS AND COSTA. GREAT MINDS WITH….Well, you know

Doug:
Speaking of “rumbling boisterously in the basement of the piano”, as you did in reference to John Williams on a Stan Getz recording, it reminded me of how few pianists explore the left side of the keyboard and how, done properly, it can be an additional arrow in the quiver.
Eddie Costa was a very special practitioner who rumbled about as boisterously as I’ve ever heard. He is missed.
John Birchard
Doug,
Although I’m “not from the discographers” (as my grandmother might have worded it), I can offer a little more info on the recorded output of the unique player John Williams. (BTW, his lower register rumblings and his general attack always, to my ear, have brought Eddie Costa to mind.)
But wait a sec: practically unknown is a CD issued by the ever-resourceful Japanese (the imprint is Marshmallow, #MVCJ 30061, recorded October 20 and 21, 1994). This gives us ten tracks by Williams, Jeff Grubbs and Frank Isola; on 5 of the tracks Spike Robinson on tenor is added. Title of the side is Welcome Back.
George Ziskind

Speaking of ever-resourceful, the Rifftides staff went on a googling expedition into the darkest recesses of the internet and tracked down (heh heh) the mysterious Marshallow in its lair, a Japanese website.Welcome Back is the third item on the page. A click on the button quaintly labeled “Listen More” will bring up a box with audio samples of three tracks. The page gives the price, 2,800 yen, but, alas, nary a hint about how to acquire this CD, so perhaps the staff is merely semi-ever-resourceful. A message to info@marshmallow-records.com may bring ordering information. If you try, please let us know what happens.

The veteran vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake writes in response to yesterday’s John Williams item:

I bought the John Williams 10′ inch LP while in high school. (Stephen F. Austin in Houston). I still have it today and it’s in excellent condition. I play it every once in awhile. I also bought during the same period the big Stan Getz at The Shrine Auditorium double recording with John Williams and Bob Brookmeyer. Over the ensuing years someone lifted that one from me but I got it back years later on CD.

Stan Getz at The Shrine, originally a fancy two-LP boxed set, is reissued as a single CD. “Feather Merchant,” the piece that opened the live concert recording on LP, closes the CD. It begins with four blues choruses by Williams in which he manages to be elliptical and allusive while at the same time rumbling boisterously in the basement of the piano. It’s a balancing act that I never tire of hearing.

During long stretches of 1953 and ‘54, John Williams was the pianist in Stan Getz’s quintet and quartet. Wiliams is often described in biographies as a disciple of Bud Powell who was also influenced by Horace Silver. That is true. It is also true that oxygen influences flame, a fact that tells us nothing about the differences among flames. In the population of pianists influenced by Powell and Silver, Williams was identifiable by a keyboard touch that produced a spikey, percussive, rollicking forward motion, an infectious swing. Almost in contradiction, at the same time he somehow achieved a smoothness of phrasing that invested his improvised lines with the logic of inevitability. He managed to make his listeners anticipate what was coming in a solo and yet surprise them when he got there.
Williams’ first album under his own name was John Williams, a ten-inch LP on the Emarcy label, recorded in 1954. His trio had Bill Anthony on bass and the unique Detroit drummer Frank Isola, fellow members of the Stan Getz group. Williams jokes today that he often wonders who got the third copy of the album after he and his mother each bought one. It may not have been a big seller, but it quickly became a favorite of musicians and, after Emarcy pulled it, of collectors. In the 1990s, a broker of rare LPs who sold to Japanese LP zealots told me that a mint copy of John Williams was going in Japan for upwards of $300. I blush to confess that I sold him my beat-up copy for considerably less than that, making him wait while I first copied it to tape. As we listened, I hummed along to Wiliams’ solos, so embedded in my brain had they become over four decades of nearly wearing out the album.
It was a puzzle, given the LP’s iconic status, why Emarcy did not reissue it on CD, and why Verve did not bring it out after the company acquired the Emarcy catalog. A good guess is that the decision was made by accountants. Time has cured that ill. Copyright laws in Spain declare that after fifty years, recorded material is fair game (I’m not sure that’s the exact wording of the law). So, the resourceful Fresh Sound label has put on one CD John Williams and the pianist’s second Emarcy album, a twelve-inch LP called John Williams Trio, recorded in 1955. This belated event probably doesn’t do much for the inflated price of the original LPs, but it is a boon to the substantial number of Williams fans who have been clamoring for a reissue. It may also gain him new fans.
The second album, done in three sessions with shifting personnel among bassists and drummers, doesn’t have quite the concentrated charm of the ten-inch 1954 session. That is in part, I suspect, because Frank Isola is on only one track. Nonetheless, it has wonderful moments. Taken together, the twenty tracks capture John Williams when his playing was full of freshness, vigor and peppery lyricism. By all accounts, including the evidence of an appearance with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, it still is. He has never stopped playing, but he took a few decades off to become a banker and, for twenty years, a city commissioner of Hollywood, Florida. In conversation, Williams tends to deprecate his playing in the 1950s as inadequate, an evaluation that flies in the face of the wisdom of his employers—StanGetz, Bob Brookmeyer, Cannonball Adderley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims among them—and of listeners who have been stimulated by his work for half a century.
I should point out, although by now it may be obvious, that this John Williams is not the Star Wars John Williams.

Pianist and singer Patti Wicks saw yesterday’s post about Antonio Carlos Jobim and sent a link to video of Jobim, widely known as “Tom,” and his friend the incomparable Elis Regina singing his “Aguas de Marco.” I’ve played it a half-dozen times and can’t get enough of seeing the joy they found in performing together. Watch her hands.

Eleven years after his death, the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim is as universal as that of Gershwin, Berlin and Porter. Yet, until the issue of the new boxed set The Prime of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the three albums in it were out of general circulation except for a brief reappearance shortly after he died. They are The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim; Love, Strings and Jobim; and, most important, A Certain Mr. Jobim, all from the 1960s, all originally on the Warner Bros. label but reissued on dbk.
The Wonderful World has good arrangements by Nelson Riddle, and in the instrumental “Surfboard” a great one. Jobim’s voice is more relaxed than in A Certain Mr. Jobim, but his collaboration with the arranger Claus Ogerman in A Certan Mr. Jobim strikes the Brazilian spark that Riddle achieves less successfully. The empathy between Jobim and Ogerman, so dramatically displayed in Jobim’s first American album a few years earlier, is typified in a haunting performance of “Bonita” that puts the Riddle “Bonita” in the shade. But in each case, we hear the composer of “Desafinado,” “She’s a Carioca,” “Dindi,” “Outra Vez” and “Agua de Beber” singing, playing piano and guitar and giving his songs definitive interpretations.
Love, Strings and Jobim was, and is, packaged to look like a Jobim album. It is, rather, a collection of songs and performances by other Brazilian musicains presented by Jobim, with only two of his songs included and not peformed by him. It offers glimpses of Eumir Deodato, Oscar Castro-Neves and Baden Powell, among others, all part of the infusion of bossa nova into the mainstream of music and worth having for that reason. Terri Hinte’s liner notes, full of knowledge, keep such matters in perspective and provide insights into Jobim and his music. Her understanding of Brazil and Brazilians is a bonus in a package that will fill empty spaces in many otherwise complete Jobim collections. The set does not provide a comprehensive look at Jobim, but it is a reasonable point of entry to his world.

Julius La Rosa, naturally, has a considerable interest in lyrics and lyricists. He called my attention to these little verses by Yip Harburg, one of the greatest American lyricists (“Over the Rainbow,” “April in Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” among 600 or so others).

No matter how much I probe and prod
I cannot quite believe in God,
But, oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.
O innocent victims of Cupid,
Remember this terse little verse:
To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse.
©Rhymes for the Irreverent, E.Y. Harburg

A few Rifftiders—if that’s the term (and it might as well be)—have asked about our mid-week visit to tulip country in the Skagit Valley of western Washington State. Briefly, then:
The first day was warm and sunny. We walked around the charming waterfront town of La Conner, population 750, where we stayed two nights at the Wild Iris Inn. The second day was chilly, damp, exhilarating. We went to the fields of Tulip Town, then RoozenGaarde, and toured both extensively, glad that we had our muck boots. We drove around the valley and saw hundreds of acres of tulips and daffodils at their peak, also admiring the splendid old houses on high foundations, ready for the hundred-year flood. New Orleans might benefit from sending a delegation to study their construction. We ate and drank well at good La Conner restaurants. It was a fine and welcome short vacation.

While I was away in the tulip fields, On An Overgrown Path posted a piece on the late Michel Petrucciani. It includes a link to a thirty-eight-minute video about the pianist. In it, Petrucciani talks about his aversion to applause, his fear of death, his love of the piano. It’s an important film. Visit On An Overgrown Path, then come back, please.

The most recent concert at The Seasons was by a Russian group I went to hear out of curiosity. I knew that the members of Trio Voronezh were classically trained at the conservatory in Voronezh, a city near the Don river 250 miles south of Moscow. I knew that they played instruments I had never heard; the domra, the bajan and the double-bass balalaika. But what drew me in was their repertoire, which included J.S. Bach, Shostakovich, Mozart, Astor Piazolla, Gershwin, Khachaturian, an assortment of other Russian composers, Leroy Anderson and Consuelo Velasquez (“Besame Mucho”).
The domra played by Vladimir Volochin is a sort of lute dating from the 1400s, a forerunner of the balalaika. Its heritage is Mongolian. Like the balalaika, it is a three-stringed instrument played with a pick, but it is round, not triangular. Sergei Telshev’s bajan is an accordian with chromatic buttons rather than a keyboard. In most parts of the world, it is considered, even disparaged as, a novelty or folk instrument. Russians take the bajan seriously and study it in institutes of higher music education. Valerie Petrukhin’s instrument is a large version of the traditional balalakia, tuned in E, A and D in the general tonal range of the double bass violin. It stands on a leg attached to the low corner of the triangle. Petrukhin plays it standing, slightly hunched. For the most part, he strums the strings to keep time and provide chords, but once in a while he uses pizzicato in the way a jazz musician plays the bass. You may see the instruments and hear samples of the trio’s work if you go to their website.
Trio Voronezh’s virtuosity was astonishing. They played everything from memory, including the complex “Burlesque” allegro con brio from the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 and a wild medley of Gershwin songs that incorporated devilish variations on “I Got Rhythm.” Their “Air On The G-String” from BWV 1068 was a passionate performance of that ravishing Bach melody. They captured the Argentine tango mystery of three of Astor Piazolla’s pieces, including his famous “Oblivion.” These are not improvising musicians, but they played with verve so infectious that they created an aura of sponaneity. They charmed the audience with their demeanor, Volochin with his mime’s expressions, all with their close attention to one another and their double bows following each piece. They played two encores and got three standing ovations, heartfelt ones, not the obligatory kind. I was standing and applauding with the rest of the audience.
Afterward, chatting with Volokhin, I jokingly asked why they included no Charlie Parker pieces in their concerts. At first he looked puzzled, then he played a few bars of air saxophone and grinned. “We don’t know any,” he said.
Later, I dubbed the master takes of “Yardbird Suite” and “Donna Lee,” packaged the CDR with lead sheets and sent them off to Trio Voronezh headquarters. Whether they will tackle Bird, I have no idea, but if they do, I want to be there for the premier performance. I’ll let you know if it happens. In the meantime, if they show up in your neighborhood, don’t miss them.

The new Doug’s Picks in the right column include CDs by Roland Kirk and Herb Geller. Kirk’s is a live recording made in Hamburg in 1972. Geller lived in Hamburg then, as he does now. In a coincidence that I don’t possess enough imagination to have made up, Geller attended Kirk’s concert. He read the Rifftides reviews and sent the following message. I have added links to explain some of his references.

Dear Doug,
I remember Roland Kirk´s concert at the NDR concert hall (the funkhaus). It was the only time I heard him live. It seemed to me at the time he did about 20 minutes of blowing in one breath! Then he started playing two and even three instruments at a time. He even played a few notes of flute and clarinet spontaneously and I almost fell out of my chair. This was of course like a circus act, but he pulled it off. The depth of his music for me was not that enthralling but the physical act itself was incredible.
I didn´t know the other musicians, but after they were announced, the drummer´s name rang a bell, especially since he was Richie Goldberg and black. After they finished, I went to him and told him my name. He jumped up and hugged me, saying he used to be married to Vi Redd, and Lorraine and I had visited them at their home in L.A. I went to Dorsey High School along with Vi and we were good friends there. He introduced me to Roland who told me he admired my playing especially on “Sleighride” and commented that the song had a difficult bridge, (which was why I enjoyed playing it).
Herbie G.

Lorraine was Geller’s first wife, a brilliant pianist who is with him on “Sleighride” on the Herb Geller Plays album. She died in 1958, an event that sent him into depression and on an extended trip to escape it. He ended up in Europe, where he has lived, for the most part, ever since.
Amazon offers Herb Geller Plays at an inflated import CD price. The album has not been reissued on CD in the United States, but Verve, which controls the EmArcy catalogue, offers it here as an iTunes download. Those who comprehend that technology may want to investigate.

No blogging for a couple of days. I’m off the see the tulips.
You are invited to browse the Rifftides archive. You’ll find the archive gateway in the right-hand column. Just click and you can travel back in time…but only as far as June 15, 2005, our launch date.

Observe, please, that in the right column we have brand new Doug’s Picks. They are three CDs by saxophonists who could hardly be less alike, a DVD to replicate a great night out, and a book that may make you wish you could drop back into a special time in San Francisco. Of course, it could be argued that in San Francisco, every time is special, but this one, worse luck, is gone forever.

The brilliant pianist Kenny Drew, Jr., has reached the boiling point over the condition of black popular music in the United States. Here are two excerpts from his current essay on the All About Jazz website:

…when I first started studying music I was told that music had to consist of three elements: melody, harmony and rhythm. Rap music (an oxymoron similar to “military intelligence “or “jumbo shrimp”) has basically discarded the first two elements and is left with nothing but rhythm. Since only one element of music is present in most of this crap it doesn’t even justify being called music. Our culture has been dumbed down to the point where your average dumb-ass American can’t tell the difference between a truly great musician and somebody who’s been studying their instrument for a week.
I recently discovered that there is now a form of rap called “coke rap”, in which the lyrics deal mainly with the sale, distribution and use of cocaine and crack. I find it offensive that any record company would try to make a profit from glorifying something that has decimated the black community the way that crack has. I hope that one day while 50Cent is lounging by the pool in his humongous mansion surrounded by beautiful groupies, he might consider how many lives were ruined by the poison he used to sell, and how many more lives will be potentially damaged by the musical poison he’s selling now.

Drew gets more colorful and specific about what rap and hip-hop are doing to the fabric of American society with their messages about drugs, the subjugation of women and glorification of criminal violence. He’s far from the first to notice; Gene Lees long ago addressed all of it in his JazzLetter. But Drew is a young black man. Maybe his rant will get a modicum of attention in the black community. To read the whole thing, go here.

The great football player, singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson was born on this day in 1898. Like legions of other Americans, he made the mistake in the 1930s of thinking that Communism had the solution to problems of inequality in the United States. He went to the Soviet Union to investigate the system and for the rest of his life paid for the trip by being made the target of relentless surveillance by the government. Dr. Chilledair (Bill Reed) posts a recollection of Robeson’s ingenious, courageous and humorous 1949 end-run around McCarthyite witch-hunters. Go here to read the piece and follow Reed’s link to a sound bite of saxophonist Buddy Collette’s eyewitness account of the event.