Over the years, Grace Cathedral on San Francisco’s Nob Hill has hosted countless concerts of importance. Among them, both in 1965, were Duke Ellington’s magnificent Second Sacred Concert and pianist Vince Guaraldi’s Grace Cathedral Concert with his trio and an 86-voice choir. Rifftides reader and veteran audio expert Jim Brown attended last week’s more secular concert at Grace Cathedral. Presented by the SFJazz organization, it featured four clarinetists. Jim kindly offered to share his impressions of the event. SFJazz sent Ronald Davis’s photographs.

By Jim Brown

At Grace Cathedral we heard four very different clarinetists put on a magnificent display of improvisation at its very best. The Cathedral is a huge, very reverberant space. The only way to success there is to tailor the performance to the acoustics, and these four masters, Don Byron, Anat Cohen, David Murray, and Todd Marcus, did just that, from their first notes to their last.

Their entrances set the tone, Murray coming from the most distant altar at the front of the church, Marcus from the very rear, Byron and Cohen from left and right transepts, in a performance that can best be called ethereal.

Working with no microphones, the musicians played the huge cathedral like another instrument, much as did J. S. Bach, whom some consider the world’s first jazz musician, playing organ in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig nearly three centuries earlier. The entrance was one of the night’s high points, and there were more, among them Anat Cohen’s solo reading of Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” “My One and Only Love” by Marcus, and a short four part piece that sounded like Ellington.

Each player got to do his own thing solo and with another horn for support. Murray (pictured left), an outside player, went outside for his solo and got Byron to go out with him. Cohen and Marcus went more lyrically, Byron somewhere in the middle. The solo and duo pieces were interspersed with arranged pieces for the ensemble; each, again, stylistically different. Some were more satisfying than others.

It seemed to me that Don Byron (pictured right) was the real catalyst, and if there was a leader, it was he. I consider him one of the most creative and important musicians of his generation—he gets the history and the many related paths that jazz and its related forms take. He respects them, and he performs them with great sensitivity and fire. We heard him several years ago at Grace, and this performance was no less sensitive or exciting. He clearly understood Grace, and played to it beautifully. And on other occasions, we’ve heard excellent bands he led playing the music of the small bands of the ’30s (Duke, Raymond Scott, John Kirby), Prez, the blues, and klezmer.

Part of playing to Grace’s acoustics is to do so with flowing lines, letting complex harmonies, which the room supports, take the place of rhythm, which the acoustics would destroy. This was a night that did not “swing” in the conventional sense, but it was great jazz.

Five stars to these four fine musicians, and to SFJazz for doing everything right.

Thanks to Jim Brown for permission to post his review and to Ronald Davis for his photographs.

Here it is the middle of November and the yellow roses are in full splendor. Maybe a horticulturist could explain the phenomenon of such an extended period of bloom, but let’s simply enjoy it and use it as a far-fetched excuse to summon a couple of Rose pieces from the archives.

First, pictures from the garden:

Then, Duke Ellington with Lawrence Brown and Ivie Anderson…

…and George Shearing’s quintet.

Have a good weekend.

For a couple more hours, it is still Veterans Day here in the western United States. I’ve been thinking that I should post something about this American holiday dedicated to the men and women who have sacrificed years of their lives—and in too many cases life itself—to keep us free.

I did not watch a parade. I didn’t go to church. I didn’t visit a cemetery. I spent considerable time thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of a system that makes ultimate demands on the best of its citizens. I concluded, as I believe most Americans do, that the benefits justify the sacrifices.

To my Marine Corps pals, to all of us—Happy Veterans Day.

Sullivan Fortner, Aria (Impulse!)

In Sullivan Fortner’s debut album as a leader, the shaded subtlety of his keyboard touch is only one of the young pianist’s notable attributes. His harmonic inventiveness, grasp of the jazz piano vocabulary and rich employment of his quartet’s resources are equally impressive. Still, the listener is seduced by Fortner’s variety of tonal coloration, ranging from a nocturnal quietness in the classic ballad “For All We Know” to rambunctious clusterings of intervals of a second in Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.”

With the full quartet, he evokes 17th century dance music in “Passepied.” Accompanied by bass and drums, Fortner achieves the musical equivalent of a painter’s pointillism in the chattering rhythms of “All The Things You Are,” and lightheartedness in “You Are Special,” a song the late Fred Rogers wrote for his children’s television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fortner says that one of his childhood inspirations was Johnny Costa, the pianist who provided most of the music for the Rogers show. “Aria” and three other Fortner originals are from a six-part suite that he wrote on commission from the Jazz Gallery in New York. Fortner’s equally youthful sidemen (he is 28) are drummer Joe Dyson, bassist Aidan Carroll and saxophonist Tivon Pennicott. Pennicott plays soprano and tenor saxophones. His relaxed tenor solo on “Ballade” is a highlight of the album. Fortner’s work here, alone and with his band, further makes understandable his selection earlier this year for the Cole Porter Fellow In Jazz award of the American Pianists Association.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, For One To Love (Mack Avenue)

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s second album places her even more firmly in the top rank of 21st century singers. Her strategy is unusual among young vocalists—she simply sings, which is not to say that she sings simply. There is nothing simple about pitch-perfect intonation and absolute control from low contralto range to the voice equivalent of a saxophone altissimo. But that’s a matter of technique in use of the fine instrument that she was born with or developed.

In this collection of 12 songs, five of which peg her as a polished and adventurous composer and lyricist, she performs in the service of the songs. She employs no trace of the fashionable trend of mixing genres and superimposing, say, a hip-hop, rock, Middle Eastern or country and western ethos. She does not scat, which alone should qualify her for an award of some kind. I hope that Stephen Sondheim hears what Ms. Salvant, pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers do with (and for) his and Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. It is a tour de force that captures, even magnifies, the anticipation and mystery of a major theatre piece, and it is a great jazz performance on all levels.

Simplicity does not rule out dramatic interpretation, as she makes clear in Spencer and Clarence Williams’ bluesy “What’s the Matter Now?”(1926) and coyly but not cloyingly in the ironic “Stepsister’s Lament” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella. When she sings Blanche Calloway’s and Clyde Hart’s 1931 “Growlin’ Dan,” she growls. Her interpretation of “The Trolley Song” owes little to Judy Garland’s, but it is fully as charming. Of Ms. Salvant’s compositions, the waltz “Monday” and “Fog,” a lament for lost love, present opportunities and challenges for other singers, and for instrumentalists.

Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4, New York Concerts (Elemental Music)

After the success of Jimmy Giuffre’s trios in the 1950s, he recorded the visionary Columbia album fittingly titled Free Fall in 1962. It did not sell well, Columbia dropped Giuffre, and for nearly a decade he did not make another record for a commercial label. Nor did he change his commitment to the avant garde. He continued to play clarinet and tenor saxophone and compose with commitment to free expression unrestricted by traditional guidelines of harmony, rhythm or form.

The two CDs in this set document how Giuffre was thinking about music during the sixties, and how he made it with some of the most forward-looking musicians of the time. By contractual agreement, tapes of the concerts recorded by the young engineer George Klabin were broadcast only once on the Columbia University radio station WCKR. Until the Elemental label’s Zev Feldman arranged to liberate it, the music was not heard again until now.

Giuffre and his fellow saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman took parallel paths as they developed and refined their approaches to free jazz. The trio recording in the set includes Guiffre, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Joe Chambers interpreting the Coleman composition “Crossroads.” Otherwise, Giuffre wrote all of the music heard here. For a concert earlier in 1965, Guiffre and Chambers made it a quartet with pianist Don Friedman and bassist Barre Phillips. Friedman had the technical gifts and adventurous spirit to adapt to free form playing in ways he has seldom pursued in his own albums. The May, 1965, concert attests to his ability to enhance the contrapuntal relationship that Giuffre wanted among the four instruments.

Fifty years later, this is demanding listening. Open minds will find rewards not only in Giuffre’s virtuosity and inventiveness on both of his instruments, but also in the stimulating pursuit of his goals by all of the participants. This is heady stuff.

In Seattle, the Earshot Festival is easing into the penultimate weekend of its six-week run. On Sunday, Jim Wilke, the veteran broadcast chronicler of jazz in the region, will present some of the musicians still to come at the festival. Here is his announcement:

This Sunday, November 8 at 2 PM on Jazz Northwest (88.5 KPLU and kplu.org), we’ll sample some of the musicians who’ll be appearing at venues around the Seattle area. Included is music by vocal artist Jay Clayton (pictured), clarinetist Anat Cohen, and pianist/composers Wayne Horvitz, Larry Fuller and Brad Mehldau. In addition, this program opens with music of Billy Strayhorn, whose centennial is being celebrated this year.

Previous programs are archived and available for streaming at jazznw.org

Here is Jay Clayton with the late Don Lanphere in a live album recorded at Seattle’s Jazz Alley.

Lennie Tristano, including The New Tristano (Atlantic/Rhino)

Researching notes for the forthcoming Don Friedman album discussed in this post a couple of weeks ago led me to revisit the original Lennie Tristano recording of “Requiem.” Friedman includes the piece on his CD. Tristano recorded it with his trio on the death of Charlie Parker in 1955. A dirge with overtones of the romantic classical period that transforms into a slow blues in F, “Requiem” carries an impact that gives the lie to critical potshots over the years accusing Tristano of an intellectual approach that shut out emotion. There is plenty of emotion in the trio tracks with bassist Peter Ind and drummer Jeff Morton and in the remarkable live quartet performances, also recorded in 1955, at New York’s Sing Song Room. The quartet features Tristano’s most prominent student and adherent, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, with bassist Gene Ramey and drummer Art Taylor. Captured in superb early two-track stereo, the repertoire is standard songs, with Konitz at the top of his lyrical game and Tristano at his most relaxed, inventing lines that in places reflect his admiration for Parker and elsewhere spring from the well of originality that made him such an influence on other pianists.

On the unaccompanied pieces originally released in 1962 in The New Tristano, the rhythmic force of his left hand and its interaction with the inventions of his right carry feeling that affected pianists including Bill Evans. Tristano’s unorthodox harmonic conception and his incorporation of block chords had an impact on Evans, Clare Fischer and Alan Broadbent, among others, and can be heard in George Shearing’s work with his quintet. Tristano transforms the harmonic patterns of standard songs into originals. “Deliberation,” for instance, is based on “Indiana,” the three-part “Scene and Variations” on “My Melancholy Baby,” “G-minor Complex” on “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

In all, the reissue in 1994 of these Tristano albums together makes the CD a basic repertoire item in any serious collection. It should continue to be available to inspire developing musicians and for general enjoyment.

“What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.” —Bill Evans

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” —Frederic Chopin

“To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.” —Cecil Taylor

“There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” —Johann Sebastian Bach

“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” —Thelonious Monk

The problems that took the Rifftides computer out of action a few days ago were resolved when I replaced it with a newer model. Then, attempts to post new items derailed in an onslaught of password problems involving the publishing platform. That has been fixed, too——I think. Perhaps any computer owner will understand my lingering skepticism.

So: onward.

Had it been possible to post yesterday, I would have wished you a happy Halloween and shown you the official 2015 Rifftides Jack O’lantern. Here it is, a day late, nestled in a bed of fallen maple leaves on the porch.

We had 67 trick-or-treaters last night, including a repulsive monster dripping blood and an enchanting princess who touched us on the shoulder with her wand.

News Item: the pianist Jessica Williams has recovered from the surgery that impeded her career for a time. She is preparing for a new phase. The word is that she is likely to begin rehearsing a group incorporating strings. From her website, a photo taken by her husband during a shopping expedition accompanies her declaration that she has “improved posture and almost no trace of scoliosis or spinal deformity after my three-segment lumbar back surgery.” That would seem to suggest that her left hand may be as formidable as ever. See and hear, as an example, what she did with it did a few years ago in a performance of “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”

Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dee Dee’s Feathers (Okeh)

Dee Dee Bridgewater is strong medicine, fully a match for the powerful New Orleans repertoire she performs here. Slinking and seducing her way through Harry Connick, Jr.’s “One Fine Thing,” finding joy and irony in “Saint James Infirmary,” riding the parade beat in “Dee Dee’s Feathers,” challenging Irvin Mayfield’s wa-wa trumpet “wa” for “wa” and scream for scream in Hoagy Carmichael’s “New Orleans,” Bridgewater is a force as primal as a Gulf hurricane.

Much of the music centers on power and ruggedness, but she brings her musicality to every track, singing impeccably in tune and with flawless time even when pushing the rhythm envelope. If “Congo Square,” “Whoopin’ Blues” and Dr. John’s “Big Chief” are contrivances for summoning up the New Orleans party atmosphere, they are contrivances that work. Mayfield’s “C’est Ici Que Je T’aime,” Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” and Bob Thiele’s “What A Wonderful World” dial back the tempo without slacking the energy.

Having lived in New Orleans for eight years, I know what it means to miss it. Bridgewater’s and Mayfield’s passionate version of “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” doesn’t make missing it any easier.

This may come a tad late as news but not too late—I trust—for enjoyment. Last spring, Sullivan Fortner won the Cole Porter Fellow In Jazz award of the American Pianists Association. Fortner is a 28-year-old New Orleanian who attracted favorable notice as the pianist in trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s quintet and for his work with other jazz artists including Christian Scott and Stefon Harris. The award and its $100,000 prize came in competition with four other rising pianists, Christian Sands, Zach Lapidus, Emmet Cohen and Kris Bowers. The judges were pianists Bill Charlap, Billy Childs, Amina Figarova and Edward Simon. Executive Al Pryor of Mack Avenue Records was also on the panel.

Video from the March competition in Indianapolis, Indiana, shows us the skill and adaptability that the judges saw and heard in Fortner’s round of the finals. First, he accompanied singer Dianne Reeves. Then, backed by the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, he played Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.”

At last report, Sullivan Fortner was back on the road, touring with Roy Hargrove.

Today was chock-full of interviewing, transcribing, researching and, in general, preparing to write liner notes for a new Don Friedman trio album. The research included diving into books, rummaging through the web for additional information and—best of all—listening to Friedman play the piano and hearing some of the music that has influenced him over the years. Among the listening was the Don Friedman Project at the 2005 Jazz Baltica Festival on Germany’s Baltic seacoast. The project included the late guitarist Jim Hall, bassist George Mraz and drummer Lewis Nash. Despite what the onscreen title says at 00:27, the piece in this rare video is “How Deep is the Ocean?”

In my research for the Friedman notes, I thought that I would sample a video of Leonard Bernstein playing and conducting Maurice Ravel’s seminal Piano Concerto in G-Major, which inspired one of the pieces in the forthcoming Fresh Sound album. Sampling wasn’t good enough. I ended up watching and listening to all three movements of a piece whose secrets I thought I knew—until I was mesmerized by what Bernstein did with it. If you can spare 24 minutes, go here. You, too, may be mesmerized. YouTube doesn’t identify the orchestra. It does not seem to be the New York Philharmonic.

The nearly infinite flexibility of English makes the language universally useful and often confusing. Seeing the word for the first time, who would know how to pronounce “Arkansas?” Imagine that you had never heard “colonel,” “sword” or “Wednesday.” How would you say them? The peculiarities of English were challenging enough before computers. The digital revolution often explodes conventional usage.

In the pre-digital age, “nesting” might have had to do with birds or with human cohabitation, not HTML technique. “Hypertext” might have described a book by a writer high on amphetamines. “OOP” was a comic strip caveman; now, it’s object-oriented programming. “Schema,” the old Greek word adapted to English, used to refer to a plan or scheme. Now, it’s an XML document.

No piece of digital jargon is more common or less logical than “email.” When most written correspondence was through the post office, we sent a letter, not a “mail.” Yet, in the language of digital communication, we send “an email.” We email each other, making the noun a verb. Logically, it should be an email message or, simply, a message. But, what does logic have to do with how language changes? Maybe it’s best just to sit back and be amazed, or amused, at the way it evolves.

On Yahoo’s Dave Brubeck listserve, John Bolger called attention to an unsual version of Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo ala Turk.” It is by the Dutch ensemble Fuse—five string players and a percussionist. According to the group’s website, like many young bands today they play in a variety of genres including pop, rock, classical and jazz. Among composers whose works they have recently performed are Brubeck, Bartok and Britney Spears. Here’s the Brubeck piece.

Fuse is Mascha Van Nieuwkerk, cello; Adriaan Breunis, viola; Emma van der Shale and Julia Philippens, violin; and Tobias Nijboer, bass. Ms. Philippens soloed on “Blue Rondo.” For more information, see their website.

Have a good weekend.

Last weekend, pianist Bill Mays wrapped up a tour of the west with his Inventions Trio, which includes trumpeter and flugelhornist Marvin Stamm and cellist Alisa Horn. Longtime collaborators in several projects, Mays and Stamm also played a duo concert in The Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz series.

Sunday afternoon, segments of the concert will be broadcast and streamed on Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest. From Mr. Wilke’s announcement:

Describing what they do as “a musical conversation” the longtime friends and musical partners eschew long solos in favor of frequent exchanges of melody and improvisation. Their concert at SAM included original compositions, standards and jazz classics. Highlights from the concert will air on Jazz Northwest, on 88.5 KPLU on Sunday, October 18 at 2 PM Pacific.

Across the mountains from Seattle, The Inventions Trio played a Friday night concert at TheSeasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington. The next evening, Bill played and I narrated our History of Jazz Piano. We may do it next year at a European festival. Negotiations are in progress.

From a few years ago, here are Stamm and Mays with guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Ed Soph. Stamm wrote “Samba du Nancy” with Mrs. Stamm in mind. The video is slightly out of focus. The music is not.