[contextly_auto_sidebar id="4mrnOfzzj7rbyIx38tcNx4Di9CpwWRqi"] Perhaps best know for his work with Vince Guaraldi, Cal Tjader and Earl Hines, Dean Reilly plays bass in the San Francisco Band Swing Fever. For a time, the band included Buddy DeFranco. In observance of DeFranco’s passing last … [Read more...]

When Duke Ellington's band worked on New Years Eve—and it usually did—at midnight Ellington nodded casually to his musicians and they performed the newest variation on their head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne.” As you listen to the 1962 studio version, please know that the Rifftides … [Read more...]

I learned the feeling of playing a melody and playing long phrases from Tommy Dorsey. (On Charlie Parker)I decided to play the clarinet like Bird articulated on the sax. It wasn’t so easy to imitate Artie Shaw, and even more difficult to copy Bird... I learned more about the idea of rhythm and … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vuRd87ug4idXpW5aLnIa3C9oeQj6u8zn"] The past seven days have seen the deaths of three musicians who came to prominence as young men and had long careers in the swing, bebop and post-bop eras. Buddy DeFranco, who in the 1940s was the first to successfully adapt the … [Read more...]

Nat Cole (1919-1965) was one of the most admired young jazz pianists of the late 1930s and early ‘40s. In nightclubs, he occasionally included vocals in numbers with his trio, and patrons began requesting more of them. The King Cole Trio’s 1943 recording of his composition “Straight Up and Fly … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="uPkcdoYgiMKZmu9XXlsLZ6ZBsnrWUexG"] Doing a bit of holiday morning web surfing, I discovered a live version of one of the pieces from Carla Bley’s delightful 2008 album Carla’s Christmas Carols. Ms. Bley and Steve Swallow performed it in Montenegro in 2010 with Ed … [Read more...]

The Rifftides staff’s present to you is a masterpiece from John Lewis’s rare 1958 album European Windows. Thank you for being with us in 2014 and for the reader comments that are essential to what makes blogging for you so rewarding. … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="YSgOUejoUSrxyclfDlxHra23Kqs4TDny"] Frank Zappa (1940-1993), a gifted musician who dipped his toe into jazz, never demonstrated more than a smidgeon of what he knew about the genre. But he left us with the memorable observation, “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="biC2vOREzy8PdTTbhFZPNiv22lClwGTG"] Thanks to Rifftides reader Greg Curtis for flagging a performance by Les Paul of Harold Arlen’s best known song. This was at Fat Tuesday’s in New York, most likely in the 1990s. Paul’s accompanists were rhythm guitarist Lou … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="ROYWqvJQiOpHdWzJ4ffCpdzOkv72hIvn"] Once during a listening session, I apologized to Paul Desmond for the pops and scratches on a worn LP. “I don’t care if it’s on a cellophane strip,” he said, “ as long as I can hear what everybody is doing.” When it comes … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="bgvh2yyaxsx3eADh8mpRBNp3N9AboaQT"] If your listening mood has shifted to Christmas, veteran jazz broadcaster Jim Wilke is ready to accommodate you. He has prepared a wide-ranging program by artists from his neck of the woods, the Pacific Northwest. Here’s Jim’s … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="qdDCS7BZfPPmKCFIpI6c55e5Q5Rp04io"] How do you get to Carnegie Hall? "Practice," the violinist Fritz Kreisler famously told a tourist who asked him that question on a New York street. But can a performer practice too much—practice the life out of a piece of music? … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="xanFlgjw7HSoTPVozCDubGHxw1mWLgn4"] The new video recording of an acclaimed theatre piece recounts the surreal workings of pianist Fred Hersch’s mind during a long medically induced coma. Documentaries about trumpeter Clifford Brown and the composer, arranger and … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="bLXjQhCHqLSvwiD0ns2KNtC7foLJY6By"] Alexander Eydelman, who founded the Moscow Jazz Art Club in 1993 and has been its only president, writes stories under the name" Aleksander Antoshin. Through" the help of Rifftides Moscow correspondent Svetlana Ilicheva, Mr. Eydelman … [Read more...]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="2IyUmP9Wbts3ABKAM1m53LFcxeaEnZMg"] On this second anniversary of Dave Brubeck’s death, an animated cartoon from Russia is a reminder of the impact that his music has had in many, perhaps most, parts of the world. Occasional Rifftides Moscow correspondent Svetlana … [Read more...]