Terence Blanchard, Magnetic (Blue Note)

Even in tracks orchestrated with layers of electronic mysteries, a fine sense of chance-taking permeates Blanchard’s return to the Blue Note label. “Don’t Run,” the piece with the least contrivance, is to a considerable degree the album’s most daring. Built on a stuttering unison melodic line, it is just short of a free-for-all for the trumpeter, soprano saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist Ron Carter, with drummer Kendrick Scott’s strategically placed interjections urging them along. The track has a sense of street-beat abandon evocative of parade music in Blanchard’s native New Orleans. Carter is magisterial on this piece and “Magnetic.” The gifted 19-year-old bassist Joshua Crumbly is on eight of the album’s 10 tracks. He has yet to attain Carter’s incisiveness, but he more than holds his own.

“Pet Step Sitter’s Theme Song,” by the young Cuban pianist Fabian Almazan, also captures some of the same wild feeling as “Don’t Run.” Blanchard, Almazan, and Coltrane—on tenor sax—solo passionately. Ethereal tones paint the background of the piece. They sound like a guitar but may be Blanchard’s horn routed through a synthesizer. As the piece fades away, someone adds touches of vocalise. Almazan is the only soloist in a dazzling performance of his feature piece, “Comet.” Studio techniques expand the dramatic title track by Blanchard’s quintet to Wagnerian proportions, particularly in his solo, but the manipulations fall away for tenor saxophonist Brice Winston’s and Almazan’s sharply etched choruses.

“Hallucinations” (not the Bud Powell tune, but a Blanchard composition) goes to lengths to live up to its title, with more of those eerie guitar-like slips and slides permeating the atmosphere. Scott’s “No Borders, Just Horizons” gets underway with the drummer’s tight press rolls initiating a solo impressive for its concision. Blanchard’s virtuosic improvisation in this piece, indeed throughout the album, is tightly controlled, with few of the glissandos, slurs and half-valve effects that in some of his previous work became clichés to the point of distraction. Saxophonist Winston (pictured) appears on five tracks. The purity of his tone and the fleetness of his soloing are notable throughout and dominate the recording of his composition “Time to Spare.” Through the magic of electronic manipulation, Blanchard becomes a raucous trumpet trio on the relentlessly intense “Another Step,” which ends in a round of sardonic laughter.

An observation on the packaging, possibly of concern only to grumpy critics: the CD booklet lists the names of the musicians in miniscule white type on a red background, making it a challenge to decipher who plays on which tracks without the aid of a powerful light or a magnifying glass, or both. The three pages inside the booklet are largely devoted to a widescreen photo of Blanchard surrounded by spectral out-of-focus images. The one panel of notes is devoted to Blanchard’s thanking everyone involved in the making of the CD, including the president of the record company and members of the production staff. Some of that space might have been used for facts about this fascinating, often complex music. The lack of meaningful information is by no means unusual to this album. It follows a trend that jazz and classical companies have adopted from the pop and rock branches of the record industry. That may satisfy requirements for trendiness, but it is of no help to listeners who want to know about what they’re hearing.

That cavil aside, this is a recommended album.

Imagine the president of the United States regularly presenting jazz in the East Room of the White House; that is the level of recognition Václav Klaus gave the music. President of the Czech Republic from 2003 to March of this year, Klaus succeeded the Republic’s first president, Václav Havel. He hosted 90 monthly concerts known as Jazz na Hradě, at the Prague Castle. This 2011 Rifftides post reports on one of the events. Here on the left, we see Klaus with the Czech pianist Emil Viklický, who served the president as adviser to the series.

This is from a 2005 Rifftides post:

From the web site of San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club of California comes a transcript containing what may be the most unexpected question ever asked the head of a country in a public forum. The club’s speaker last November was Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. At the end of a question and answer session covering the European Union, Turkey, Iraq and the nature of elections in his post-Communist nation, this was the exchange:

Q: If you could be any jazz pianist, who would you be?

A: I will never be a jazz pianist in my life. Nevertheless, I think that jazz music for us is very important, and I must say that in the early 1960s, the beginning of jazz clubs in the Czech Republic, in Prague, was part of the culture of revolution which brought about the 1960s and the Prague Spring and all of that – so jazz plays a very important part in our lives.

Now that Klaus has left office, the series at the Castle has ended, but Klaus’s interest in jazz has not. In his blog Prague Jazz, Tony Emmerson discusses the transition to a new location.

New President Miloš Zeman has not continued with Jazz na Hradě but the concept, the logo, some of the organisers and the man himself have relocated. Under the title of Jazzová KLAUSura, the new concert series kicked off at the Autoklub České Republiky with American flute and tenor sax maestro Lew Tabackin.

To read all of Emmerson’s report, go here.

Jazz na HradÄ› presented not only Viklický, Mraz and other heroes of Czech Jazz but also the occasional visiting American band. Last October, it was the quintet led by trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Joe Lovano with Lawrence Fields, piano; Linda Oh, bass; and Joey Baron, drums. Their pieces included “Body and Soul.”

The story goes that a friend who hadn’t seen the great tenor saxophonist Al Cohn in a long time encountered him on the street in New York and said, “Hey, Al, where are you living these days?”

“Oh,” Al said, “I’m living in the past.”

Looking over a string of recent posts, it is clear that Rifftides has been living in the past, too. For the most part, our retro residency has been dictated by events. For one thing—as James Moody told me his grandmother once said—“Folks is dyin’ what ain’t never died before.” Attention must be paid.

Now it’s time to visit the present. Let’s catch up with a few of the jazz releases flooding the allegedly shrinking jazz marketplace, starting with these two:

Joel Miller, Swim (Origin)

In his sixth album, his first for Origin, Montreal tenor saxophonist Joel Miller again makes music that melds intricacy and accessibility. This time out, he is aided greatly by pianist Geoffrey Keezer, as virtuosic as Miller in bringing relaxation to the complex lines in many of the leader’s compositions. The young veteran bassist Fraser Hollins and drummer Greg Ritchie provide Miller and Keezer strength and flexibility necessary to keep some of the challenging pieces afloat. In Gil Evans’s “Time of the Barracudas,” Hollins and Ritchie are also impressive as soloists. It is the album’s only composition not written by Miller.

The pieces range from the rhythmic convolutions of “MarkAdamDrum” and “Step Into My Office” to the Caribbean flavor of “This and That” and the relaxed balladry of “Afternoon Off.” Miller presents “Nos étoiles” in two parts, a brief introduction with the character of an elegy and a section with an insistent beat that inspires Keezer and Miller to short solos of controlled daring. I found myself rewinding to the perfection of their unison line in the penultimate chorus. “Jobim,” two minutes long, ends the album with lyricism, passion and a sense that its composition and performance may have taken place simultaneously.

Randy Cole’s short film Grounded, screened in a 2011 Rifftides post, was largely about the making of this album. For Swim, Miller won Canada’s 2013 Juno and East Coast Music awards for best jazz recording.

Wallace Roney, Understanding (High Note)

Roney continues to base his trumpet playing on mid-to-late-period Miles Davis. He has been channeling Davis for so many years now that speculation about the real Wallace Roney doesn’t matter; the real Roney is a brilliant student of Davis. Questioning Roney’s modeling himself on Davis is as pointless as it was in the 1940s to question Paul Quinichette’s having created himself in the image of Lester Young. Quinichette did Young, Sol Yaged did Benny Goodman, Roney does Davis—and does him well. There is no better example in this album than his solo on McCoy Tyner’s “Search For Peace,” a perfectly executed evocation of Davis at his most lyrical in the period of his last great quintet.

Roney’s “Understanding,” a fast blues with free touches, is his compositional contribution to the album. Arnold Lee, who plays alto saxophone with Roney, wrote “Red Lantern.” “Kotra” is from the vigorous tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon, another member of the band’s young front line. Otherwise, the tunes are by Tyner, Duke Pearson and, in the case of “Understanding,” drummer Roy Brooks (1938-2005) from his 1970 album The Free Slave. Bassist Daryl Johns, drummer Kush Abadey and pianists Victor Gould and Eden Ladin, alternating tracks, are Roney discoveries worth keeping an ear on. Gould’s work on Tyner’s “You Taught My Heart to Sing” is a highlight of the album, reflective of the mood Roney sets with his muted evocation of the melody.

Barring the unexpected, we’ll have further reviews of recent albums as the week progresses.

“Groovin’ High”: James Moody, alto saxophone; Al Haig, piano; Ray Brown, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums.

That is from a PBS Sound Stage program, Dizzy Gillespie’s Bebop Reunion 1975. Gillespie sat out one of his most famous compositions, but there is plenty of him in the complete show, along with Moody, Milt Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Carroll and that incomparable rhythm section.

Happy Sunday

You might assume that “June is Busting Out All Over,” an exuberant Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune from Carousel, is unsuitable as a jazz vehicle. Two Bennies, Goodman and Carter, might argue—if they were around to argue—that there are no bad songs, only bad interpretations. Benny Goodman recorded “June is Busting Out All Over” with a pleasant vocal by Kay Penton in 1945, the year the show debuted on Broadway. Goodman’s record includes his clarinet solo and a 16-bar interlude by the little-remembered Charlie Queener (1921-1997), whose harmonic resourcefulness belied his pigeonhole classification as a “Dixieland” pianist.

Benny Carter wrote a short take-no-prisoners big band arrangement of the song for his 1958 United Artists album Aspects. It has solos, fully in the spirit of the chart, by Joe Gordon, trumpet; Frank Rosolino, trombone; Shelly Manne, drums; and the leader on alto saxophone. The video accompanying the music is one of Steve Cerra’s tribute productions for his blog Jazz Profiles. We use it here, by way of YouTube, with Steve’s permission, more or less.

The Rifftides staff wishes you a carefree weekend and a splendid June.

Educator and jazz researcher Thomas Cunniffe has posted analysis and additional information about Paul Desmond’s solo on “The Way You Look Tonight” from the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz At Oberlin. It was after correspondence with Tom that I began looking into the disparity between the solo on the original LP issue and that on all reissues. (See the item and comments two exhibits below). In his blog, Jazz History Online, he investigates possible reasons for the cut and aspects of the solo’s content. He also provides comparative MP3 tracks of the solo before and after the edit. To read, and listen to, Tom’s invaluable contribution, go to Jazz History Online.

The death this week in New York of Jean Bach at 94 spurred memories of her role in the jazz community going back to the early 1940s. Ms. Bach was not a musician but an advocate whose enthusiasm for and understanding of the art endeared her to several generations of musicians. Her knowledge of the music and its creators made her unusual among other society figures who sometimes amused themselves by dabbling in the jazz scene. She was known for hosting in her home on Washington Mews in Greenwich Village parties that attracted admirers as varied as Sonny Rollins and Frank Sinatra. In a 1983 New Yorker magazine profile, Whitney Balliet quoted the singer and pianist Bobby Short:

“I was a baby just out of high school and what drew me to Jean was not only her love for Duke Ellington but the fact that she could sing note for note Ben Webster solos and Cootie Williams solos and Johnny Hodges solos. And — she knew my idol, Ivie Anderson.”

Short told Balliet she was, “by far the most elegant and beautiful and sharply intelligent person I had ever met.”

To the public, Jean Bach was best known as the producer of a film inspired by the photograph called “A Great Day in Harlem.” The following Rifftides piece appeared shortly after she revised and expanded the award-winning film.

A Great Day In Harlem: Longer And Better

Originally posted on Rifftides March 6, 2006

Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of fifty-eight musicians in front of and on the steps of a Harlem brownstone ran in Esquire magazine, which called it A Great Day In Harlem. It became one of the best known snapshots in the world, already famous for decades when Jean Bach made a film about it in 1994. Now, in her late eighties, she has expanded the film and brought the picture and its subjects even more renown. Ms. Bach, the brilliant film editor Susan Peehl and director Matthew Seig added nearly four hours of new material to the production. Like the picture that inspired it, the film is not a polished product. It is a rough and ready masterpiece that makes the most of the materials at hand, rather like a jam session solo.

At the IAJE meeting in January, Ms. Bach gave me a copy of the updated two-DVD release of A Great Day In Harlem. Over this past weekend, I finished watching it. One of its most appealing qualities is that, after the viewer has seen the main body of the production, he can dip into the nearly four hours of new features when its convenient, without fear of losing continuity. Navigation is easy by means of menu features that give the option of using alphabetical listings or—for computer users—browsing through the Kane photo with arrow keys and highlighting individual musicians to bring up their stories.

Some of the new segments are interviews with the musicians from the photo who were still alive when the film was being made, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, Bud Freeman, Horace Silver and Max Kaminsky. Most of the others in the picture were gone by then, including Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Rex Stewart, Thelonious Monk, Roy Eldridge, Count Basie and Sonny Greer. Their surviving colleagues—and sometimes the vital and knowledgeable Jean Bach herself—tell their stories, all fifty-eight of them. In their recollections, Chubby Jackson is effusive, Sonny Rollins thoughtful and writer Nat Hentoff savvy and often amused.

The cumulative effect, whether or not the viewer is a hard-core jazz fan, is a sense of the yeastiness of what may have been the last golden era of jazz. Pioneers of the form were still at work, sometimes on the bandstand with musicians a generation or two, or three, younger. A natural companion to A Great Day In Harlem, the 1957 CBS television program The Sound Of Jazz, illustrates the generational compatibility, respect and understanding that marked the New York jazz scene through the fifties and into the early sixties. Ms. Bach’s film draws from the kinescope of that landmark show for scenes, for instance, of Count Basie listening raptly to Thelonious Monk, of Gerry Mulligan playing with Ben Webster and Rex Stewart.

Bill Charlap and Kenny Washington, who didn’t exist when Kane took the picture, reflect on the legacy of their predecessors in an interview highlighted by Washington’s uncanny impression of the character and mannerisms of Jo Jones, an idol of Washington and virtually all other drummers. The new DVD set also includes a mini-documentary about the making of the film, with hilarious sidebars about the travails of fund-raising, locating musicians and trying to coax accurate information from failing memories. Ms. Bach gracefully and affectionately corrects Art Blakey’s confident representations of facts that are clearly wrong, including his claim to have owned the brownstone that was the setting for the photograph. There is a brief feature about Kane, who committed suicide in the 1990s, apparently because of health worries. In addition, Jean Bach guides the viewer through an exhibit of the many “Great Day” photo imitations; A Great Day In Philadelphia—San Diego—New Jersey—Haarlem (Netherlands), et al—even A Great Day In Hip-Hop.

The film is informative, entertaining and uplifting. Whatever misgivings you may have about where jazz is headed, A Great Day In Harlem is almost sure to make you happy about where it has been.

Paul Desmond died at the age of 52 on this date in 1977. It was Memorial Day. It had been his custom to join Dave Brubeck and his family to observe the holiday at their Connecticut home, which Paul had christened The Wilton Hilton. This time, his lung cancer made him too weak to consider the trip. From my Desmond biography, here is a summary of events leading up to his final day, beginning with an account of one of our frequent telephone conversations.

This time, sadly, it’s true; Mulgrew Miller succumbed early this morning to the effects of the stroke he suffered last Friday. Nate Chinen’s obituary in today’s New York Times offers an appreciation of the pianist and a summary of his career.

June 1 will be the first of two Charlie Haden Days at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival in Northern California, honoring the bassist’s nearly three quarters of a century as a professional musician. His career began when he was two years old. He will be 76 in August. Among those performing in tribute: Geri Allen, Lee Konitz, Haden’s Quartet West, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Carla Bley the Liberation Music Orchestra, Bill Frisell and Haden’s four musician children. For information about the Healdsburg festival, go here.

Rifftides reader Don Frese writes:

Thanks to Rifftides reader John Bolger for his timely alert to a rare opportunity to see a film tied to an important recording by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in the band’s third year. Timely? Yes, because the Brubeck memorial service in New York was so recent and because the Memorial Day weekend is the 36th anniversary of Paul’s death.

After he left his native New Orleans as a teenager, the great clarinetist and, later, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet for decades toured widely in the United States and Europe. He was respected for his originality and powerful playing, but he tired of struggling to make a consistent living in the US and moved to Paris in 1950, when he was 53. He found steady work in France and quickly became a national celebrity. A film running on YouTube, L’ Historire De Sidney Bechet, suggests his omnipresence in French cultural life and the extent of his fame in that country.

The East Room audience included Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Vice President and Mrs. George Bush and a cross section of Reagan administration dignitaries when Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes played at the White House in 1982.

By special arrangement with the publisher, Rifftides readers may acquire autographed copies of Doug’s novel Poodie James at a reduced price. To see a description of the book, read an excerpt and learn how to order, click on Purchase Doug’s Books on the blue border above. The special price will be in effect until the limited supply runs out.

Doug Ramsey is the John Steinbeck of apple country. Rich with sweet detail of the unique landscape of Washington State, Poodie James pulses with Steinbeck’s sense of character—the hurt ones, their tormentors, and everyone in between. This novel will take your heart.

—Jack Fuller, author of The Best of Jackson Payne

Last night on the PBS News Hour, Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer remembered their marathon live reporting of the Watergate hearings that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The hearings opened on May 17, 1973. In a special segment on the News Hour, McNeil and Lehrer recalled how their work as Public Broadcating System anchors of the coverage led to the evolution of PBS as a news organization and the creation of The News Hour. Many in the Congress and, certainly, in the Nixon administration thought that public broadcasting had no business reporting the news. It is likely that any American who watched the Watergate epic unfold on television retains indelible impressions of the senators who conducted the hearings and witnesses like John Dean, H.R. Haldeman, Alexander Butterfield and a parade of others.

Trumpeter Marvin Stamm and pianist Mike Holober just ended a duo concert at the library in Nyack, a Hudson River village north of New York City. The music was streamed live on the internet and is ready for viewing on the Nyack Library’s website. I snagged this screenshot as Holober and Stamm were launching into the Bill Evans composition “Funkallero.”