Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Sam Rivers And Barbara Lea, RIP

As 2011 wound down, American music lost two octogenarians who were dramatically different except for what they had in common, insistence on getting to the heart of the matter without compromise. Sam Rivers died in Orlando, Florida on December 26 at the age of 88, Barbara Lea the same day in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 82.

Rivers was a formidable saxophonist, flutist and composer. He had a university education in harmony, theory and composition, played blues with T-Bone Walker, worked with Miles Davis for a time, and became a leading figure in the avant garde. Rivers’ 1964 Fuchsia Swing Song, now a collectors item, melded experimentation with established values. His composition “Beatrice” from the album quickly joined the standard jazz repertoire. According to Rivers’ daughter Monique, he remained active as a performer and teacher until virtually the eve of his death and recorded material for dozens of albums yet to be released. Rivers was a lifelong prober beneath the surface, unsatisfied with routine, using his intellect and daring in equal measure to discover mysteries.

Here are Rivers and his quartet at the 1989 Leverkusener Jazztage in Germany, playing “Beatrice.” Rael Wesley Grant is on bass, Darryl Thompson on guitar and Steve Mcraven on drums.

Like Sam Rivers, Barbara Lea knew music inside out; she had a degree from Wellesley in music theory. Rivers was devoted to chance taking. Ms. Lea’s integrity was based in fealty to the song. She fervently believed, and said in interviews, that a singer’s business was to sing the song, not to use the song to sell herself. If it seemed to some listeners that she was too low key to be entertaining, her masterly phrasing, intonation, sense of time and understanding of the songwriter’s intentions persuaded others that her interpretations were definitive. She was sometimes described as a cabaret singer, but like Lee Wiley, whom she admired, Ms. Lea was a favorite of jazz musicians. Dick Sudhalter, Johnny Windhurst and the members of The Lawson-Haggart Jazz Band (on this album) were among her devoted fans and colleagues. There is regrettably little of Barbara Lea on video, but here’s a fine performance of “Sweet and Slow” with the trumpet obbligato and solo by Doc Cheatham. It’s from the 1984 Manassas, Virginia, jazz festival.

For The New York Times obituary of Sam Rivers, go here. For the Barbara Lea obituary, go here.

New Recommendations for 2012

Happy New Year to all Rifftides readers around the world.

For your listening, viewing and reading pleasure, the Rifftides staff offers recommendations of three CDs that differ dramatically from one another, an intimate Chet Baker DVD, and the autobiography of an irrepressible jazz institution. Please see the right column under Doug’s Picks.

CD: Corea, Gomez, Motian

Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian, Further Explorations (Concord)

The two-CD album is described in the notes as a “template,” a “tabula rasa,” rather than a tribute to Bill Evans. Nonetheless, Corea’s encounter with two great Evans sidemen underlines Evans’s profound influence on the development of the jazz piano trio and on Corea’s own playing. Released less than a month following Motian’s death at 80, the live recording from New York’s Blue Note beautifully captures the drummer’s freedom, swing and interaction. In pieces from Evans’s repertoire and others by members of the trio, there is a spirit of adventure and, in Evans’s newly found “Song No. 1,” the challenge of discovery.

CD: Pinky Winters

Pinky Winters, Winters In Summer (SSJ)

To borrow from Paul Williams’s words to Ivan Lins’ “Love Dance,” Winters knows how to turn up the quiet. Using subtleties in phrasing, pitch, intensity and tone shading, she takes ownership of a song without violating its writer’s intentions. Here, her bossa nova repertoire includes Jobim, Lees and Moraes, plus Brazilianized songs by Cole Porter, Dave Frishberg, Bob Florence and Jack Jones. A highlight: her caressing of Jobim’s and Lees’ “Dreamer,” which also has one of several simpático tenor saxophone solos by Pete Christlieb. Years pass between Pinky Winters albums. When one appears, it is an event.

CD: Ronnie Cuber

Ronnie Cuber, Ronnie (Steeplechase)

Cuber has been playing uncompromising jazz on the baritone saxophone for more than half a century. With pianist Helen Sung, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Jonathan Blake, he is in top form in this 2009 album that escaped my attention until recently. Following his hard-bop gruffness in Freddie Hubbard’s “Thermo,” Cuber floats with tenderness through Scott LaFaro’s “Gloria’s Step” and Michel LeGrand’s “Love Theme From Summer of ’42.” At the speed of thought, he burns through ”Ah Leu-Cha” and “All the Things You Are”, giving young Blake a run for his money in their exchanges.

DVD: Chet Baker

Chet Baker, Candy (MVD)

In a private library in Sweden in 1985, Baker plays and sings with his working trio of the period, pianist Michael Graillier and bassist Jean Louis Rassinfosse. Red Mitchell is a guest, not on bass but at the piano showing Baker his preferred changes to “My Romance,” which the two perform together. Baker is relaxed and impressively fleet in the 1944 title tune and in “Tempus Fugue-it,” “Nardis,” “Sad Walk,” Mitchell’s “Red’s Blues” and “Love for Sale.” His “Bye Bye Blackbird” is tinged with blues. In brief interludes, Baker chats with Mitchell about his career. It’s good to have this on DVD at last.

A Birthday To Crow About

The Rifftides staff unaccountably overlooked a memo designed to alert us yesterday to an important birthday. Bill Crow, bassist, tubist, author and occasional correspondent to this blog, became 84 years old on December 27. He continues to gig on both of his instruments and to write, among other things, his Band Room column in Allegro, the newspaper of New York musicians union local 802. Now that he is 84 and one day, we wish Bill all the best now, in 2012 and for a long time thereafter.

Here is Mr. Crow in the Gerry Mulligan quartet with Art Farmer and Dave Bailey at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. It’s from Bert Stern’s film Jazz on a Summer’s Day. The piece is Mulligan’s “As Catch Can,” recorded the same year in the album What Is There To Say?

Asked in an exchange this morning on the Jazz West Coast listserve why all of those beautiful girls were flipping over the bass player, Mr. Crow replied, “Because he was so young and handsome.”

Was?

Correspondence: On Hoagy

Mark Stryker, the music critic of The Detroit Free Press writes about yesterday’s Rifftides entry:

Your Hoagy post reminded of this piece I wrote when “Star Dust” turned 75 in 2002. Feel free to post if the spirit so moves.

It does. Thank you, Mark.

75 years of ‘Star Dust’
By Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press Music Writer

Hoagy Carmichael and his pals headed east from Indianapolis after their gig, driving all night to Richmond, Ind., home of the Gennett studio, a center of hot-jazz recording. It was Halloween; Oct. 31, 1927. Carmichael was 28, a secure pianist, budding composer, committed jazzman and doomed lawyer. The band began recording at the unseemly hour of 6 a.m. The first tune was a punchy Carmichael original titled “Friday Night,” which was soon to fall into oblivion. But the second song on the docket had legs. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Carmichael called it “Star Dust.”

Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, “Star Dust” has lodged itself deeper in Americans’ subconscious than any other popular song. It is the most-recorded pop tune in history, with at least 1,800 versions; some estimates reach 2,300. And it is surely the only song that can claim interpreters as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Liberace, Billy Ward and His Dominoes, Artie Shaw, Arthur Fiedler, John Coltrane, the London Symphony and Fred Flintstone. “Star Dust” has become the apotheosis of the great American songbook, trumping not only anthems by Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Gershwin and Kern, but also stiff competition in Carmichael’s own portfolio — “Skylark,” “Lazy River,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul” (the ditty Tom Hanks plays on a mammoth keyboard in “Big”) and “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

You can request “Star Dust” in any piano bar in the United States — maybe in the world — and 99 out of 100 pianists will deliver a recognizable version. The song has permeated the culture so thoroughly that it shows up in a wry picture by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein: a comic-book chanteuse singing “The melody haunts my reverie.”

The diamond anniversary of “Star Dust” arrives with a germinating Carmichael zeitgeist. Richard Sudhalter’s newly published “Stardust Melody” (Oxford, $35) is the first full-length biography of the composer. And recordings of “Star Dust” continue to land in stores at a breathtaking rate. Just since 1995, Peer LTD, which owns the majority of the publishing rights to the song, has dispersed 533 licenses for new and reissued recordings, including one arriving this week by jazz pianist Bill Charlap, part of an all-Carmichael CD titled — what else? — “Stardust.”

Yet a chord of mystery has always underscored Americans’ love affair with “Star Dust.” The tune is an unlikely candidate for pop immortality, with a complex structure and rambling melodic line, thick with the jazzy perfume of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, that would seem too hip for the room. Its hairpin turns are difficult to sing, even to hum. Composer Alec Wilder once called it a “very far-out” song for any era and “absolutely phenomenal” for its time.

“Star Dust” was not an instant hit, and a listen to Carmichael’s original record of it tells you why. A peppy instrumental, the loose performance never quite liberates the lyricism in the notes. Only later — afterMitchell Parish (pictured) contributed his elegant lyric in 1929 and subsequent interpreters slowed the tempo and reconceived the tune as a dreamy serenade — did it begin to march into history. So many elements conspired to elevate “Star Dust” that sorting them out after 75 years is dangerously reductive. Certainly, Carmichael’s sublime melody holds the ultimate key to the song’s transcendence. But Parish’s rich imagery offered the public another window into “Star Dust,” recasting it as a memorable love song about a love song: “Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night/Dreaming of a song.”

The popularity of the song eventually took on a life of its own, a self-sustaining legacy built on the ever-growing mountain of recordings and public performances. Music criticism and cultural history can explain only so much; magic and metaphysics cannot be discounted in art. How does one explain the Mona Lisa? The iconic status of “Star Dust” even baffled Carmichael. “Dad knew he had written a great song but was always semi-flabbergasted that this song he put together in 1927 become America’s favorite,” says Hoagy Bix Carmichael, the composer’s son, from his home in New York. “It’s like Michael Jordan in that game when he was making everything, and he looks over to press row and kind of shrugs as if to say, ‘I can’t explain it.’ ”

The story behind “Star Dust” begins with the self-invented genius that was Carmichael. He was the most jazz-oriented of all the great tunesmiths, but also the most democratic. His appeal was so broad because his music partook of so much of America. Carmichael’s aesthetic bridged a striking number of schisms in American popular culture: jazz and pop, black and white, urban and rural, composer and performer, tradition and innovation. Carmichael was born into a family of modest means in Bloomington, Ind., in 1899. A child of the heartland, he inscribed his songs with a folksy sentimentality that hearkened back to Stephen Foster. Carmichael, to paraphrase critic Gary Giddins, wrote of lazy rivers and lazybones, of buttermilk skies and small-fry, of washboard blues and blue orchids, of daybreak and cool evenings, of skylarks and stardust.

But Carmichael was also a bona fide jazzman, who came of age as jazz was morphing into the soundtrack of an urban America. He led his own dance bands at Indiana University in the ’20s; soaked up the sounds of emerging blackmusicians like Louis Armstrong, and fell under the sway of Beiderbecke, another Midwesterner. The Iowa-born cornetist, the first great white jazzmusician, became his friend, colleague and mentor. Beiderbecke’s exalted sense of melody and harmony colored much of Carmichael’s finest work, especially “Star Dust.” In his biography, Sudhalter points out that the essence of the song is Beiderbecke’s “correlated phrasing” — an initial phrase is followed by a companion idea, and then both are summed up in a third phrase.

The result is a self-regenerating melody with few obvious repetitions but many subtle allusions and rhymes. The overall form is a 16-bar verse followed by a 32-bar chorus that unfolds in an unconventional A-B-A-C structure. The yo-yo melody outlines major and minor triads, spiced with unpredictable passing tones and piquant harmony. The impact of the whole is spontaneous, ever-fresh: a frozen improvisation.

Carmichael wrote two entertaining autobiographies, but when it comes to the origins of “Star Dust,” his story recalls John Ford’s aphorism: When legend becomes fact, print the legend. Carmichael sets the tale on the lovely wooded campus of Indiana University in 1927. “It was a hot night, sweet with the death of summer and the hint and promise of fall,” Carmichael wrote in “The Stardust Road” (1946). “A waiting night, a night marking time, the end of a season. The stars were bright, close to me, and the North Star hung low over the trees.” Carmichael looks to the sky, and the nascent melody begins to haunt his reverie. He rushes to the Book Nook, a campus hangout, where he hammers out the details of the tune on the battered upright piano.

The truth is rather more mundane. Sudhalter reports that Carmichael tinkered with what he called his “jam tune” for at least a year and admitted in a private memo that he finished “Star Dust” on a rickety grand piano in an unspecified location.

If the public didn’t immediately embrace the song, musicians took note. At the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit, Carmichael gave a copy of “Star Dust” to Don Redman, who led the influential McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. Redmanrecorded it in 1928. Mills Music published the song in early 1929 as a piano solo titled “Stardust” and assigned the task of writing a lyric to Parish, who would contribute the words to such songs as “Sweet Lorraine,” “Stars Fell on Alabama” and “Sleigh Ride.”

Bandleader Isham Jones, who had heard McKinney’s Cotton Pickers play “Star Dust,” made a landmark recording in 1930. It was still done as an instrumental, but it was the first recording to approach the song as a nostalgic ballad. From there things moved swiftly. Bands began playing stock arrangements of “Star Dust”; Walter Winchell trumpeted the song on radio and in print. And 27-year-old crooner Bing Crosby recorded the first vocal version of the verse and chorus in 1931. Carmichael scholar John Edward Hasse reports that, by 1942, 50 jazz-oriented recordings of the song had been made, along with dozens of versions by dance bands and singers.

Pinpointing the total number of recordings that have been made is impossible, because the publisher’s records are buried in warehouses, but Carmichael’s son says a Pennsylvania record collector amassed 1,800 versions. A few years ago, the collector’s widow sent the records to Hoagy Bix, who donated them to his father’s archives at Indiana University. The Guinness Book of World Records gives the title of most-recorded song to Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday,” with 1,600 versions, but the evidence favors “Star Dust.”

Carmichael eventually outgrew his infatuation with the jazz life, moving to New York and later Hollywood. Along the way, he all but invented the idea of the singer-songwriter in pop music, parlaying his persona into movie stardom. But “Star Dust” remains his crowning achievement. You could argue, perhaps, that “Skylark” and “Georgia on My Mind” were equally inspired melodic or harmonic creations. And Johnny Mercer’s poetic lyric to “Skylark” gives Parish a run for his money. But after 75 years, “Star Dust” is still “Star Dust,” and there’s no higher praise in American music.

15 Notable Recordings of ‘Star Dust”

Hoagy Carmichael (1927). The composer’s band cut the first version as a peppy, loose instrumental dance number.

Isham Jones (1930). The dance-band leader transformed the song into a dreamy ballad, setting the tone for most future recordings.

Bing Crosby (1931). The first recording with Mitchell Parish’s lyrics.

Louis Armstrong (1931). Armstrong’s miraculous vocal performance and trumpet solo picks the tempo up to a trot and rhythmically abstracts Carmichael’s melody into a profound statement of the transcendent power of jazz.

Artie Shaw (1940). The ultimate big-band version suggests the sublime luminosity of a Vermeer painting.

Hoagy Carmichael (1942). Carmichael’s first vocal version: pared down, folksy, charming.

Ella Fitzgerald (1954). A lovely, brilliantly phrased duet with pianist Ellis Larkins.

Nat (King) Cole (1956). One of the most pristine, exquisitely tailored of all vocal versions.

Billy Ward and His Dominoes (1957) and Nino Tempo & April Stevens (1964). The highest-charting versions from the rock era. Ward’s cover peaked at No. 12, Tempo and Stevens’ at No. 32.

Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble (1961). Fred and Barney aspire to songwriting stardom, penning awful lyrics to a melody that happens to be “Star Dust.” Redemption comes when they team with an animated version of Carmichael (voiced by Hoagy).

Frank Sinatra (1961). Beautiful but bizarre arrangement in which Sinatra sings only the verse, leaving the chorus out altogether.

Louis Hayes (1978). The Detroit-born drummer’s quartet gives one of the most adventurous readings, a showcase for the neglected alto saxophonist Frank Strozier.

Willie Nelson (1978). An unadorned reading in which Nelson’s rural twang and direct delivery evoke the perfume of Carmichael.

Bill Charlap (2002). Charlap’s version features vocalist Shirley Horn and one of the slowest tempos ever.

#

Coda 1: I can’t put my hands on the relevant clip from The Flintstones where Fred and Barney sing their own awful lyrics to the melody of “Star Dust” but I did find this climatic number from that episode with Hoagy.

Coda 2: Hoagy and I share the same hometown, Bloomington, Ind.

Remembering Hoagy Carmichael

We lost Hoagy Carmichael on this date in 1981. We have not lost “Skylark.” Here’s Carmichael in 1956 singing one of his most beloved songs. The words are by Johnny Mercer, the alto saxophone solo is by Art Pepper, the trumpet by Don Fagerquist.

The song is from Hoagy Sings Carmichael With the Pacific Jazzmen, his classic album with arrangements by Johnny Mandel—a basic repertoire item.

KitchenAid Plays Ellington

Our new stove chimes a catchy riff that has been challenging me to recognize it. Finally, it hit me: the stove’s timer chirps the first four bars of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Song.” This is a remarkable coincidence or the engineering staff at KitchenAid has the hippest designer in the appliance business. Either way, it’s a bit of serendipity with which I am happy to be greeted every morning when my tea has steeped.

I don’t have a recording of the timer, but here is the first—and many listeners think the best—of Ellington’s many recordings of “Creole Love Call,” from October 26, 1927. The band was Ellington, piano; Bubber Miley and Louis Metcalf trumpets; Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, trombone; Otto Hardwick, Harry Carney and Rudy Jackson, reeds; Fred Guy, banjo; Wellman Braud, bass; Sonny Greer, drums. The vocalist, at once ethereal and earthy, is Adelaide Hall. Gunther Schuller has written of the “radiantly singing New Orleans-styled solos” by Miley on trumpet and Jackson on clarinet.

Joyeux Noel, Frohe Weihnachten, Feliz Navidad, Christmas Alegre, Lystig Jul, メリークリスマス, Natale Allegro, 圣诞快乐, Καλά Χριστούγεννα, 즐거운 성탄, И к всему доброй ночи And С Новым Годом

christmas-candles.jpg
The Rifftides staff wishes you a Merry Christmas, a splendid holiday season and happy listening.
For good measure, here is a favorite winter scene, Mount Rainier, 90 miles from Rifftides World Headquarters.

Recent Listening, In Brief

I’ll never catch up, but here are a few 2011 CDs I wanted to report on before the year gets away.

John Basile, Amplitudes (StringTime Jazz)

Basile has a series of agreeable conversations with two other guitarists, both of whom—through the wonders of digital overdubbing—are also Basile. Multiple tracking by a solitary musician goes back to Bill Evans (tape, 1963) and well beyond, to Sidney Bechet’s “Sheik of Araby” and “Blues of Bechet” (lacquer discs, 1941). What’s different here is that Basile and an engineer accomplished the feat somewhat more conveniently, with the use of an iPhone app. So much for the gee-whiz aspect of the recording. Forget the process and listen to the music, which is typical of Basile’s swing, melodicism and harmonic resourcefulness. In approaches as varied as the rhythm guitar and walking bass in Jane Herbert’s “It’s Nice to be With You,” the pointillism of Basile’s own 12-tone “First Row,” the samba inflections of Jobim’s “Fotografia” and the pleasingly abrasive spectrum distortions in “My Funny Valentine,” Basile manages a variety of moods and textures while maintaining the sensibility of the album. Among other highlights, he reminds us that in the right hands, or sets of hands, “Moon River” isn’t worn out; it’s still a great tune to blow on. In a single chorus of Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” he captures the tune’s air of hopeful resignation.

Sir Roland Hanna, Colors From a Giant’s Kit (IPO)

Even casual YouTube surfers who find videos by the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra are likely to be captivated by the piano introductions, interludes and endings played by Roland Hanna. Serious followers of that band know Hanna, drummer Lewis and bassist Richard Davis, as one of the great rhythm sections. His advanced technique melded with his harmonic imagination and knowledge of the jazz tradition to make him also one of the music’s most complete solo performers. Long before he founded IPO records, Bill Sorin made unaccompanied recordings of Hanna. The pianist died in 2003, and this year Sorin compiled 14 of those performances in this collection. The album is a vibrant addition to the label’s previous three Hanna albums and to his extensive discography, which dates from the late 1950s. The pieces include standards by Ellington, Strayhorn, Coltrane, Victor Young and Ray Noble, and four Hanna compositions. His “20th Century Rag” reflects love for a central pre-jazz tradition, tinted with ironic chord voicings that might have made Shostakovich smile. He treats Coltrane’s “Naima” and Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge” as rhapsodies. His introduction to Ellington’s “In a Mellotone” is a riff that works perfectly for the piece but almost makes the listener wish that Hanna had developed it as a composition of its own. He invests “Cherokee” with a bluesy introduction, then proceeds at a pace slower than the customary hurricane bebop tempo, allowing himself thorough examination of the song’s interior qualities. It’s a lovely album.

Dubravka Tomsic, Mozart Works for piano (IPO)
Dubravka Tomsic, Chopin Works for piano (IPO)

Roland Hanna was a keen student of classical piano literature and of the principal classical pianists of his day. It is unlikely that he was not aware of the great Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomsic. For all of her prowess, high regard among her peers, fame in Europe and reputation as one of Artur Rubenstein’s favorite protégés, Tomsic was surprisingly little known in the United States until the 1990s. Much of her recording has been for relatively obscure European labels that are hard to find. Sorin, the IPO Records chief who championed Hanna, has followed her work for years. He issued an album of her interpretations of Franz Liszt in 2001. He brought her back to New York to record two CDs released in 2011, one of Chopin, one of Mozart. Chopin fascinated many jazz pianists, among them Hanna and Bill Evans, and continues to influence young jazz musicians. If you wonder why, Tomsic’s readings of the massive Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor, four scherzos and the famous Berceuse may give you answers. In three sonatas and the Fantasia in D Minor, she discloses the energy, command and variety in Mozart’s piano writing. Whether or not you customarily follow classical piano, these are highly recommended.

The Angel City Big Band featuring Bonnie Bowden, An Angel City Christmas

If you’re looking for a collection of Christmas songs well sung and played in nicely crafted arrangements, this one meets your criterion. The arrangers include Tom Kubis, John LaBarbera and Ralph Carmichael, the singer is the unfailingly cheerful and gratifyingly in-tune Bowden, and the songs are all proven classics. If for nothing more than Bowden’s astonishing high-register unison vocalese with the trumpets on “Let it Snow,” this would be one of my new seasonal favorites. Over the years, I have grown tired of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “The Christmas Song,” Nat Cole and Mel Tormé notwithstanding. Bowden and the Angel City crew of skilled studio craftsmen restored them for me. She does a great job with the verse to “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve.”

Christmas Listening Tip

In addition to Christmas jazz around the clock Christmas Eve and Christmas day, the internet radio station known as The Jazz Knob will present several instances of the late radio host Chuck Niles’s reading of “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.” Niles was a Southern California jazz disc jockey from 1957 until his death in 2004. His presentation of the classic Christmas poem became a tradition in the Los Angeles area. For the schedule of readings and to listen to The Jazz Knob any time, go here.

Sloane On Brookmeyer

Carol Sloane posts infrequently on her blog, Sloanview. When she puts something up, it’s worth reading. Sloane and Bob Brookmeyer were close friends for a time. Her recollections of him are fond and frank. The piece is illustrated with a candid photo of the two of them, Jimmy Rowles and Tommy Flanagan. To read it go here.

Broadbent’s Short Tour

Shortly before Alan Broadbent moved from Southern California to New York, he told the Los Angeles Times:

People are making more out of this than they need to. The bulk of my work is as a touring musician, and I can do that from anywhere.

One of Broadbent’s shorter tours these days is on the train into Manhattan from his new home in the northern suburbs. It remains to be seen how much time he will be able to devote to playing in clubs there, but it worked out well when he took his trio into the Kitano Hotel. In the video of this performance of one of his favorite songs, through the window behind him you will see traffic on Park Avenue. You will also see bassist Putter Smith, Broadbent’s longtime California colleague, and drummer Mike Stephans, who, like many musicians working in New York, lives in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

Brookmeyer Revisited

Rummaging through Rifftides for posts about Bob Brookmeyer, I found that he is mentioned dozens of times and is the focus of several pieces. You can rummage on your own by entering his name in the “Search this website” box just below the artsjournalblogs logo. This one from 2008 concentrates on a rarity among Brookmeyer recordings.

An earlier post is a review of a daring new Brookmeyer album. It begins:

Like Brahms and Bartók late in their careers, Bob Brookmeyer has achieved increased profundity by clarifying his musical palette. The tensions and conflicts that continued to roil his compositions as he emerged from a period of electronics and experimentation in the first half of the 1990s may not be gone, but if they linger they do not dominate.

To read the whole thing, go here.

To know Brookmeyer better by way of hearing him talk about his music and career, you can do no better than listen to the NPR Jazz Profiles program produced by Bill Kirchner first broadcast in 1999. Find it on Bob’s website by going here and scrolling to the bottom of the page. Among the site’s other interesting attractions is an illustrated list of 42 important Brookmeyer albums, with links to their availability.

Why miss an opportunity to hear more of Brookmeyer’s music? Here’s the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra with his stunning arrangement of “St.Louis Blues.” The soloists are Jones, Brookmeyer, Jerome Richardson, Jones and Roland Hanna. YouTube fades it away, but not before we get the essence of the writing and some fine soloing.

Bob Brookmeyer: 1929-2011

Bob Brookmeyer died in his sleep Thursday night in a hospital near his home in Grantham, New Hampshire. He would have been 82 on December 19. The cause is reported as congestive heart failure.

Several weeks ago, Bob sent me a test pressing of the next album by his New Art Orchestra. He attached a note:

This CD is very much a pre-production sample. Please hold close to your vest.

I have been listening to it repeatedly and holding it close, only to learn today that it has been released under the title Standards as an artistShare download and as a CD. The music demonstrates the craftsmanship, wisdom, humor, flair and architectonic mastery of form that make Brookmeyer one of the supreme composers and orchestrators in the history of jazz. As discrete statements, as settings for soloists, and in support of the singing of Fay Claassen, his pieces on Standards are emblematic of the happy place Brookmeyer had reached in a life and career that had many highs but also lows that for a time his music reflected. He once said of the period when he dealt in electronic music and acoustic music that sounded electronic that some of it “could make your teeth hurt.” He worked through whatever led to that, and for the past decade he wrote music that could make you smile, not because it was funny—although it could be, in his wry way—but because it was so satisfying.

I may write more tomorrow about Brookmeyer and his productive life as a writer and as the standard-setter for valve trombone playing. Tonight, allow me to simply share with you two Brookmeyer moments.

Here’s a track from a 1956 12-inch LP, one of his early albums as a leader. This is the 26-year-old Brookmeyer with Jimmy Rowles, piano; Buddy Clark, bass; and Mel Lewis, drums.

Moving ahead half a century, here’s Brookmeyer conducting his beloved New Art Orchestra in “Get Well Soon.” The tenor sax soloist is Paul Heller.

Bob Brookmeyer, RIP

Jan Allan

Sweden has been on my mind in connection with the deadline project that is slowing my Rifftides output. The project does not involve Jan Allan, but he is Swedish and it occurs to me that not enough of you may know about this splendid trumpeter. Here he is playing in the northern university town of Umeå in 1994. The piece is “The Man I Love.” Jan Allan with Kjell Öhman, piano; Georg Riedel bass; Petur Östlund drums.


A sad footnote, evidently added to the YouTube page by Allan:


This trumpet was stolen at Central Station in Stockholm May 2000. Bach 37 gold plated, dual lead pipes and Jan Allan engraved in left side of bell (see video) I miss it so, glad for ideas in what part in the world I can find it.

I have been able to find no report that he has recovered the horn.

When Bud Met Marian

For the next few days—at least—Rifftides will be in semi-suspension while I face down a couple of deadlines. I should be able to tell you sometime next week about the more urgent one. In the meantime, the staff will continue to monitor and post your comments. When possible, I will contribute a tidbit or two, starting now.

Early this month, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz rebroadcast her 2006 program with Bud Shank (1926-2009). She kept marveling that the two had never before met, and they had a fine chat about his days with Charlie Barnet and Stan Kenton and his career as a saxophonist and flutist who transcended the “West Coast” label. Mostly, though, they made music. Shank brought bassist Martin Wind and drummer Tim Horner. The impromptu Shank-McPartland quartet played “Alone Together,” “Beautiful Love,” “Lover Man” and other good tunes, including “Emily” as a fast waltz. There are plenty of reminders of what a good accompanist McP is. If you missed the program or wish to hear it again, go here and click on “Listen Now.”