This seems to be the season for a new round of films based, more or less, on the lives of jazz trumpet players. See the October 11 Rifftides post about Don Cheadle as Miles Davis. The latest entry in the category is Born To Be Blue, which was screened yesterday and today in special presentations at … [Read more...]

Miles Ahead, the movie, opened today at the New York Film Festival. Veteran actor Don Cheadle directed the film, which stars him in the title role (pictured). Since it became known months ago that the motion picture was in the works, speculation has been rampant about its faithfulness to Davis’s … [Read more...]

Bill Kirchner, An Evening Of Indigos (JazzHeads) Soprano saxophonist and composer Kirchner’s concert in New York a year ago has appeared in its entirety as an album. Kirchner overcame daunting physical problems to be able to play the concert—indeed, to be able to play at all. Throughout … [Read more...]

This weekend, The Seasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington, marks its 10th anniversary with two concerts by pianist Bill Mays, the hall’s first performer. In its early years the decommissioned Christian Science Church, an acoustic marvel, was dedicated to presenting classical music and jazz. … [Read more...]

Returning from a weekend reunion of classmates, I drove through the Cascade Mountains as the deciduous trees on Blewett Pass were beginning their glorious fall display… …which inspired thoughts of this: Now Comes The Recommendation, A Twofer Out of the mountains, headed east … [Read more...]

At last count, there were 5,276 jazz tunes based on the harmonic structure of “I Got Rhythm.” Like so many statistics, that one is invented; I have no idea how many “Rhythm” knockoffs there are. They started coming not long after George and Ira Gershwin (pictured) wrote the song for the 1930 … [Read more...]

Phil Woods died today, less than a month after he announced his retirement from playing. He was 83. Woods’ longtime drummer Bill Goodwin told me this afternoon that the veteran alto saxophonist “went out on his own terms,” electing to stop treatment for the emphysema that for years … [Read more...]

Here it is nearly the close of Bud Powell’s birthday and I’ve had my nose too close to the grindstone to take note of it. He would have been 91 today. If I had to choose one recording by Powell to celebrate all that he bequeathed us, it might be “Un Poco Loco” from 1951, with Curley Russell … [Read more...]

The Seasons performance hall in Yakima, Washington, kicked off its new jazz series last night with drummer Louis Hayes and his Cannonball Adderley Legacy band. The Hayes quintet is dedicated to interpreting the music of Adderley (1928-1975 ) and his cornetist brother Nat (1931-2000). Alto … [Read more...]

Blogging has slowed a bit while I work on a few writing projects. One of them involves notes for an album by the veteran Czech pianist Emil Viklický. It’s a collection of duets with a countryman, the young trumpeter, composer and arranger Miroslav Hloucal. Hloucal is little known outside of the … [Read more...]

This is the last day of summer. It would be wrong to let the season get away without a proper sendoff. There are, of course, countless recorded versions of the George Gershwin song from Porgy & Bess that gave summer its own anthem. The recording unanimously chosen by the Rifftides staff is from a … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="2Ej3OOPMyqtfYbV8UddWNb3XAVG25oF8"] Serious bicycling has resumed more than three months after I made a dumb move that gave me an intimate introduction to a few square feet of asphalt. I forgot what I had known since I was 10 years old; when you are on a thin-tired … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="feH0Qf2wNpY7rT9E6V0AC5ovOwmNZkB3"] Jim Wilke continues to feature on his Jazz Northwest music he recorded at this summer’s Centrum Port Townsend Jazz Festival. Here is his announcement about tomorrow's program. Each Sunday, Jazz Northwest presents music by resident … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="TDhbIPnOK5jOwmmL4ReTwyd0HIsEoDHh"] How many times did the Dave Brubeck Quartet perform “Take Five?” Hundreds? Maybe thousands. No one other than Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello would know for certain, and it's unlikely that any of them kept a … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="BK82T1xZAYVBwQ3MRZnmchvTWRE87yHB"] Bill Evans died 35 years ago today at the age of 51. Long before everybody dug him, his producer, Orrin Keepnews, titled a 1958 album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. The cover had autographed endorsements from Miles Davis, George Shearing, … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="CDDv7f5YF0t1SPuRwxSen0XJ7gerW1xC"] The campaign for a US postage stamp to honor the late Voice of America Broadcaster Willis Conover has surmounted a bureaucratic hurdle. Maristella Fuestle of the Conover archive at the University of North Texas reports that the … [Read more...]