The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, All My Yesterdays (Resonance)
This is an alert to an event—a recording documenting the birth of an ensemble that electrified listeners and set a new standard for big band jazz. Count Basie trumpeter Thad Jones and Stan Kenton drummer Mel Lewis first played together at a jam session in Detroit in 1955. More than a decade later, their affinity coalesced into the creation of a big band that debuted in New York’s Village Vanguard. Fifty years later, its successor still appears there every Monday night. What began as rehearsals of leading jazzmen playing for the joy of it became one of the most admired outfits in the music’s history. Resonance Records’ George Klabin recorded the band’s first night. He captured the joy in excellent sound. This is an invaluable addition to the Jones/Lewis canon. For background, see Mark Stryker’s essay on Jones in yesterday’s Detroit Free Press.
It is Superbowl Sunday in the United States. The Superbowl is an event in which the top two National Football League teams play one another for the league championship. Tickets to the game sell for as much as $5,000. The television audience numbers in the millions. Our photograph shows Al Hirt at the Superbowl in 1967. Jazz musicians are no longer invited to play there; rock and roll dominates the halftime show. Before today’s kickoff, Lady Gaga sang the national anthem.
Rifftides reader Mike Harris responded to last week’s post about the passing of pianist Frank Collett (pictured) and the outpouring of comments about him.
In early December, Rifftides Moscow correspondent Svetlana Ilicheva reported with enthusiasm about an appearance by singer Victoria Tchekovaya (pictured) at a vocal festival of the Moscow Jazz Art Club. Ms. Tchekovaya’s concert was in observance of the 95th birthdays of Dave Brubeck and Carmen McRae. She included songs on which those two collaborated in the Brubeck musical The Real Ambassadors, plus vocal versions of other Brubeck instrumentals with lyrics by Iola Brubeck. Svetlana told us that “Blue Rondo a la Turk†was a highlight of the occasion. Video of that performance has materialized. Here is Ms. Tchekovaya with a quartet headed by the veteran pianist Victor Friedman. Pavel Kurtz is the alto saxophonist, with bassist Eugene Onischenko and drummer Valery Dedov.
Saxophonist Gary Foster sent a link to video from a Facebook post of a seldom seen or heard performance by Horace Silver (pictured). At the 1964 Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan les Pins, France, Silver played a new composition with the latest edition of his quintet. The band was Silver, piano; Carmell Jones, trumpet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Teddy Smith, bass; and Roger Humphries, drums. The piece was “Pretty Eyes.” This is a rare instance of Jones’s work with Silver. 
worked with Louis Armstrong, Zoot Sims, Shelly Manne, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Freddie Hubbard and a list of vocalists that included Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Ernestine Anderson, Helen Merrill, Jon Hendricks, Diane Reeves and Barbra Streisand.
Any marriage depends on how the partners blend. Drummer Peter Erskine helped Weather Report and Steps Ahead achieve two of the most successful of all efforts to fuse jazz with other elements. In Dr. Um (get it?), he does it again, with collaborators who share his sense of music as a broad canvas for intermingling colors. The sources include two pieces by master Weather Report painter Joe Zawinul, one of Gustav Mahler’s deeply felt songs, Gary McFarland’s “Sage Hands,†a Vince Mendoza number and originals by Erskine and keyboardist John Beasely, the album’s co-producers. Beasely, tenor saxophonist Bob Sheppard, and guitarists Jeff Parker and Larry Koonse solo impressively. The powerful electric bass is by Janek Gwizdala. Underneath it all, Erskine gives perfect buoyancy to every mood. His solo on “Northern Cross†is riveting for its subtlety. 
Drummer Clarence Acox is a widely heralded teacher who leads the award winning Garfield Jazz Ensemble and is co-director of The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. He was the drummer for the long run of Floyd Standifer’s quartet at The New Orleans Creole Restaurant. A legendary trumpeter, 
Continuing the struggle to keep up, the Rifftides staff once again plunges into the accumulation of more-or-less-recent albums and selects a few to tell you about. The stacks you see below include the 50 or so review copies of CDs that have come in since January 1. Keeping up seems to be out of the question.
worked his way into the front rank of a new generation of jazz players. Now with ten CDs of his own and dozens with other leaders, Pelt continues to capitalize on technical skill, a tone of penetrating warmth, and subtle humor centered in rhythmic phrasing. His new collection’s centerpiece is bassist Ron Carter’s “Einbahnstrasse,†which debuted 50 years ago in an 
called “Old Theme.†It is not the first sign of unabated vitality in the collection; Vitchev, drummer Mike Shannon, bassist Dan Robbins and pianist Weber Iago have elevated moments throughout. “Old Theme,†“The Invisible Stairway,†“It May Backfire†and the joyful “Without Words As The Full Moon Shines†provide contrast to the relaxation, lyricism and air of nostalgia that characterize much of the album. A Bulgarian who settled in the San Francisco Bay area, Vitchev has an even guitar touch, creates long improvised lines and has a compositional style that encompasses Latin, Eastern European and post-Coltrane jazz elements. The moments when the quartet seems intent on making background music don’t last long.
less total dominance in popular music, Shorty Rogers maintained his popularity. One of his most successful pieces was the blues he called “Martians Go Home.” He played it on the television program Jazz Scene USA in 1962. This version of his Giants had Lou Levy, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Larry Bunker, drums; Gary Lefebvre flute; and Rogers, flugelhorn.
The documentary tells the story of the meteoric career and early burnout of the electric bassist who transformed the instrument. Video showing Pastorius (1951-1987) at work and at play alternates with appearances by musicians and others who idolized him as a performer and a composer. The rock bassist Flea’s assertion that “Jaco changed the rules of what’s possible for the bass†summarizes their collective conclusion. Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Mike Stern, Peter Erskine and Bootsy Collins are among dozens of colleagues who recall what several of them describe as Pastorius’s genius, and the joys and downsides of his manic-depressive nature. As for Pastorius in Weather Report—the band with which he became famous—Ms. Mitchell calls them “a circle of sorcerers, really.†Anyone who wants to understand how the music changed during Pastorius’s short life will learn much from this film. 
As on previous observances of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Rifftides remembers him with one of the most eloquent pieces of music to arise out of the civil rights struggle in the United States in the 1960s. The John Coltrane Quartet played it on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual telecast in 1963.
Eleven days into his 74th year, Barry Altschul is not resting on his laurels—or anything else. The drummer made his first big impression with Paul Bley’s trio in 1964 and went on to work with a cross-section of the most adventurous musicians in jazz. In the early ‘70s he, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Anthony Braxton comprised the group called Circle. Sidemen in his own bands have included Anthony Davis, Ray Anderson and Mark Helias. Altschul has played with mainstream artists—Hampton Hawes, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Owens and Paul Winter among them—but he is best known for his intuition, reflexive responses and adventuring on the forward edge of the music. Here he is in 2013 with bassist Helias in tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s trio at the Kaleidophon in Ulrichsberg, Austria.
One of the great pleasures of my years in New Orleans was a friendship with Danny Barker (1909-1994). After he moved back to his hometown from New York, Danny became a guiding light to young musicians, curator of the New Orleans Jazz Museum and a living link to the city’s musical past. The countless youngsters who learned from him came to know his history as a member of the influential Swing Era bands of Lucky Millinder and Cab Calloway, one of the music’s great rhythm guitarists and a writer of songs that last. I’m a day late in remembering what would have been his 107th birthday and happy to recognize it with this recording of Danny performing his most celebrated composition. At 01:46, watch for a photo of Danny with his wife, the fine blues singer Blue Lu Barker. Following that, you’ll see him with his Cab Calloway colleague bassist Milt Hinton.
To follow up on the post in the previous exhibit about the Bill Evans documentary, let’s revisit the 1962 Evans trio with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Paul Motian. This clip seems to be from Italian television. Evans’s harmonic chance-taking, rhythmic force and quick reactions to Motian’s accents suggest that—at least for this performance—the pianist had recovered from the shock of losing bassist Scott LaFaro in a car wreck the previous year, and that Israels was fully on board as LaFaro’s successor. The piece is Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way.†
Time Remembered, a film about pianist Bill Evans (1929-1980), is being screened in selected showings around the United States. It is set for tomorrow, Tuesday, evening in San Diego, California. The film by CBS News producer Bruce Spiegel, was eight years in the making. It has screened in New Orleans, in Hammond, Louisiana, where Evans went to college at Southeastern University, and at the Atlanta Film Festival, where it won a Golden Spotlight Award.
The clever album title stands as a fair description of the tenor saxophonist’s approach. Person is a melodist who finds the heart and essence of a tune and, within a few notes, puts his trademark on it. His choice of songs here is as satisfying as his choice of colleagues. As annotator Willard Jenkins suggests, Person internalizes what he plays—from the harmonic content to the flow of melody and the importance of the words. In common with his predecessors Ben Webster, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, the listener senses Person thinking a song’s lyric. It’s true in “Crazy He Calls Me,†the Ruth Brown classic “Teardrops From My Eyes,†Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners,†Jimmy McHugh’s and Dorothy Field’s “On The Sunny Side of the Street.†It is true of all 10 songs here, including Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford,†the longest and most heartfelt performance on the album.
A veteran jazz and classical bassist, Bren Plummer heads a trio with fellow Seattleites John Hansen, piano, and Reade Whitwell, drums. He applies his incisive bowing technique in Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “The Star-Crossed Lovers†and—in one chorus of pure melody supported by a filagree of Whitwell’s cymbal strokes—in the impressionistic title tune composed by drummer Joe Chambers for a 1968 Bobby Hutcherson recording. The trio is full of vigor on Lee Morgan’s “Boy, What a Night,†energizes the 1942 Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra hit “In the Blue of Evening†and plays Miles Davis’s “Take Off†in the neo-bop spirit of the original Blue Note recording.