Search Results for: Dave Brubeck

In the quarter of a century during which Marian McPartland has presented Piano Jazz on National Public Radio, her guests have included most of the idiom’s important pianists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ranging in style from Jay McShann to Chick Corea. One of the most rewarding of her programs was in 1984 with the late Shirley Horn. Usually shy and reluctant to verbalize about her music, Horn came out of her shell for McPartland. The two pianists got along beautifully and delivered a supremely relaxed hour of conversation and music. They played with and for one another, and Horn sang—perfectly—three songs. At times, the patter edged into the giddiness of a couple of friends indulging in girl talk. Charming stuff.
When they tackled Don Redman’s 1928 pop song “Cherry” and collided harmonically on its bridge, McPartland and Horn worked their way out of the confusion and laughed about it afterward. Collaborating on a spontaneous blues, each played at the top her game, stimulated and encouraged by the other. There may have been more profound and instructive installments of Piano Jazz—the one with Bill Evans, as an example—but none more enjoyable.
Jazz Alliance, a subsidiary of Concord Records, has issued a new batch of Piano Jazz shows on CD. They include guests Dave Brubeck, Teddy Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and—from the sort-of-, would-be- or near-jazz category—Steely Dan, Elvis Costello and Bruce Hornsby. To check out several of the most recent and older Jazz Alliance releases in the series, go here.

Click on the highlighted words to link to the recordings.
My hometown friend Bob Godfrey offered three nominations:

Thelonious Monk and Pee Wee Russell
Count Basie and Teresa Brewer
Count Basie and Oscar Peterson

Basie and Peterson recorded Satch Meets Josh in 1974 and followed it up over the years with four additional two-piano collaborations. For the 1998 reissue of Satch Meets Josh, aka Count Basie Encounters Oscar Peterson, I wrote:

If Art Tatum and Fats Waller had teamed up in a recording session, the results would undoubtedly have been something like this. Whether Waller would have induced as much restraint in the virtuosic Tatum as Basie does in Peterson is debatable, but the effect is not unwelcome. Peterson is not repressed, but there are times when you can almost hear him listening to Basie for direction. Basie’s direction is simply straight ahead, with the emphasis on “simply.” No pianist has surpassed Basie in boiling material down to its essentials. No pianist has surpassed Tatum in building material up from its essentials, but Peterson has come close. The joy of this album is not only in the contrast between style but in the compromises, most of which are made by Peterson. So who’s the stronger piano player?

Doug:
Here are two odd combinations that worked: Roland Kirk and Al Hibbler…Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims
One that failed miserably was Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton singing together (!) on a Capitol record on which they spoofed each other. It was terrible.
Jack Tracy

Mr. Tracy is a former editor of Down Beat magazine.

Hi,
I very much enjoy reading your site.
I don’t know if this counts as an “odd” coupling, but one that has always struck me is Blue Note’s pairing of Grant Green with Coltrane’s classic rhythm section on Matador. Green’s straight-ahead melodic lines worked wonderfully, I thought, with the dense, blockier sound of Tyner-Garrison-Jones. Green showed the subtle and subdued side of the section in the same way that Hartman showed the gentler side of Coltrane. And you have to respect Green for having the guts to record “My Favorite Things” with these guys right in the middle of Coltrane’s heyday … and pulling off such a great rendition.
Best,
Caleb McDaniel

Mr. McDaniel is an historian at Johns Hopkins. His blog fits the broad Other Matters category in which the Rifftides staff assumes you are all interested.

Doug:
I’d like to nominate for an “unlikely” duo the 1971 recording titled Giants, which featured Diz & Bobby Hackett backed by the extraordinary & undervalued Mary Lou Williams, George Duvivier & Grady Tate.
Not only do these gentlemen exhibit jazz & technical chops, they seem to fit together like a Stilton with a great port.Their remodeling of”Jitterbug Waltz” never fails to leave me breathless.
This session was recently reissued on the Lone Hill Jazz label, distributed by the Fresh Sound folks.
Dave Berk

The Overseas Press Club in New York, where Giants was recorded in concert in 1971, was just up 42nd Street from WPIX-TV, where I was employed. That evening, I took a leave of absence from preparation of my late newscast and caught as much of the music as I could. The fondness Diz, Bobby and Mary Lou had for one another was as visible as it is audible on the recording. A great event.

Doug:
I have followed your blog daily from its beginning and find it the most interesting thing on the internet. Thank you for starting and maintaining it. On the subject of albums that work but shouldn’t, I would recommend the Verve label’s Time for 2. The pairing of Anita O’Day and Cal Tjader and his group looks like a recording execs plan to put two people on the same label together and hope either name will draw. The results are a great vocal and small group combination with terrific efforts on everyone’s part. People forget Tjader could play “straight ahead” with the best of them and was a very sensitive team-player. The recording represents many of the same musicial values the Brubeck-Rushing has. It was recorded in 1962 and has been out on cd since 1999.
Jim Wardrop

That brings the entries up to date, but there’s no statute of limitations; if you have a favorite odd musical coupling, let us know.

In April, my publisher, Malcolm Harris, and I were in Manhattan throwing a party at Elaine’s restaurant to announce the publication of my biography of Paul Desmond. Dave and Iola Brubeck were co-hosts. There was a gratifying turnout of Paul’s friends and colleagues, and of well-wishers, musicians and assorted literati. I was disappointed that Terry Teachout couldn’t be there. He was in Washington at a meeting of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Later in the week, Terry, Malcolm, I and another friend had lunch, during which I mentioned that I was looking for a new periodical, one that would accomodate more than occasional reviews and articles. That triggered general bemoaning of the state of magazines. Suddenly, Terry’s gaze shifted skyward and his mouth fell open. We all looked up through the glass wall and ceiling of the sidewalk restaurant to see what large object was about to come crashing down on us. Not to worry. It wasn’t a plane falling. It was an idea.

“Blog,” Teachout said. “You should be doing a blog, the first real jazz blog, and I know just how and where.”

Back at his apartment—which for good reason he calls The Teachout Museum—he showed me on his I-Book the technical steps he goes through to post his artsjournal.com blog, About Last Night. I understood them about as well as I understand the progression of equations needed to conceptualize cold fusion. Don’t worry about that, he said, the important thing is to put you in touch with Doug McLennan. He whipped off a message to McLennan, the artsjournal major-domo. In short order, after I returned to the west coast, Doug and I reached an understanding—mainly of my insistence that the blog would not be only about music—and Rifftides was launched within a few weeks.
I am indebted to old pal Teachout for having that flash of inspiration, for believing that I could come out of my techno-fog, for assuming that there would be an audience, and for sending his readers our way. “I owe you plenty, Bix,” I’ve told him on more than one occasion and if you don’t know where that semtiment comes from, listen to Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Vol. 1, The Early Years: Yankee Doodle Go Home (Spirit Of ’76). Terry knows it well.
When the news came that TT, after feeling lousy for a couple of weeks, was in the hospital, I was concerned, along with hundreds of his friends and blog devotees. It was congestive heart failure, but as he reported when he returned to the Museum and limited duty,

My heart muscle is weakened but undamaged. If I do as I’m told—exactly—I have a very good chance of being around for a very long time to come. I even get to go home for Christmas tomorrow morning.

That is where he is now, with his family in what he invariably calls Smalltown USA, following his doctor’s orders. I’m sure that he’ll learn to love Ry-Krisp and yogurt, and I wish him a deliberate, cautious, relaxed and complete recovery.

My heavily-traveled weekend with an assemblage of couples out for a good time included an evening at Jazz Alley in Seattle eating well and hearing Toots Thielemans, Kenny Werner and Oscar Castro-Neves. Thielemans is a member of that astonishing corps of world-class jazz octogenarians (Hank Jones, Marian McPartland, James Moody, Dave Brubeck, ClarkTerry, Buddy DeFranco) who seem uninterested in slowing their pace, let alone retiring. At eighty-three, his polish, harmonic daring and swing on the harmonica keep him the undisputed champion not only of that unlikely jazz instrument but of all instruments that show up in the jazz magazines’ “miscellaneous” poll categories.
When it comes to Thielemans’ level of musicianship, categories don’t matter. He would likely be as creative if he played comb and tissue paper. Thielemans and Werner, long established as a formidable duo, became a virtual chamber orchestra with the addition of Castro-Neves’ guitar. There were moments at Jazz Alley when the piano, guitar and harmonica melded into chords so expansive and deep, it seemed impossible that they came from only three instruments. The authenticity of Castro-Neves’ Brazilian rhythms and bossa nova spirit were an essential part of the set’s air of happiness. An inveterate quoter, Thielemans now and then broke himself up with some of his allusions. He threw sly glances at Werner as he worked snatches of several other Frank Sinatra hits into his solo on “All The Way.”
On some pieces, Werner supplemented his piano with an electronic keyboard. His goal may have been to create atmospherics, but rather than enhance the sublime quality of the ensemble, his synthesizer “sweetening” diluted it. A pianist of his protean capabilities needs no digital reinforcement, as he demonstrated in brilliant solos on “The Dolphin,” “Chega de Saudade,” and an unlikely neo-samba treatment of “God Bless America.”
The trio’s treatment of the Irving Berlin classic inspired a standing ovation, then a short speech by Thielemans about how jazz and the American people drew him to move to the United States from Belgium in 1957 and to become a US citizen. He talked about his love of Louis Armstrong. Then, as an encore, Thielemans, Werner and Castro-Neves played “What a Wonderful World.” For the ninety minutes of their set, the world, the band, the audience, the club, were wonderful. Everything was wonderful.

Saturday night, following my lecture as jazz scholar-in-residence, I attended the final concert by the students of the Brubeck Institute’s 2005 Summer Colony. The Institute staff invited prominent jazz musicians to select the seventeen colonists by compact disc audition from among the best teenaged jazz musicians in the United States and some from outside this country.
Sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist Ben van Gelder came from the Amsterdam Conservatory in the Netherlands. Playing with haunting tonal quality, he invented melodies that incorporated a judicious use of space, and made harmonic choices outside the chords without sounding contrived. He is one of those rare young musicians who establishes his individuality in three or four notes. His work in the student all-star combo nurtured by trumpeter Ingrid Jensen included not only captivating solos but also unison playing of absolute precision. Listen for Ben van Gelder.
Kyle Athayde, the son of a high school band instructor, is seventeen and came to the Summer Colony from Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, across the bay from San Francisco. He is a trumpeter, vibraharpist and composer, impressive in all of those areas. The ensemble played a piece, the sort of thing that used to be called a rhythm ballad, that had such an aura of professionalism about it that until Athayde announced it as “a composition of my own,” I assumed that it had been composed and arranged by someone like Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster or Slide Hampton. His trumpet playing, like that of 17-year-old Gregory Diaz of Los Angeles, covered all of the harmonic, rhythmic and technical aspects required of a first-rate jazz soloist. If they have yet to achieve the level of individualism of Ben van Gelder, so do many players who have been making a living in jazz for decades.
In a few days, seventeen-year-old Katie Thiroux will begin her senior year at the Hamilton High Music Academy in Los Angeles. A bassist, she swings hard, solos well and develops supporting lines that inspire soloists. In the all-star combo, her rapport with pianist Julian Bransby and drummer Steve Renko was remarkable. She and her fellow bassists Nick Jozwiak and Charlie Zuckerman joined in a double bass trio workout on Oscar Pettiford’s “Blues in the Closet.” (Introducing them, institute executive director J.B. Dyas, a bassist, explained to the audience that all you need for a jazz combo is a bassist plus one other instrument.)
Not content to be merely a superb player, Ms. Thiroux sings beautifully, accompanying herself on bass in the manner of Kristin Korb, with whom she has studied. In a duet with Ingrid Jensen, she sang “Close Your Eyes” simply and brilliantly, with a canny understanding of the meaning of the lyrics and their relationship to the melody. She and Ingrid ended the piece with a complex unison line that culminated in a high G perfectly intoned by Jensen’s muted horn and Ms. Thiroux’s angelic voice. Generous and giving, Katie Thiroux is a thoroughgoing musician, the anthithesis of the image of the egocentric chick singer. I hope to hear more of her, for the sheer pleasure of it.
Steve Renko is fifteen. He is from St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio. His drumming is controlled but swings loosely, and he has perfect time. Julian Bransby, the seventeen-year-old pianist in Jensen’s combo, is from Bloomington, Indiana. Both of his parents are professional musicians. Given the quality of his playing, they must be proud parents, indeed.
In Saturday’s post, I mentioned Isaiah Morfin, the shy fifteen-year-old alto saxophonist who played at my book signing. That night, in the big band directed by colony instructor Joe Gilman, Isaiah, who is approximately the height and weight of his baritone saxophone, played a stomping solo awash in rhythmic intensity and tonal variety. On alto, his soloing is incandescent and derivative. On baritone, the real Isaiah seemed to emerge, brimming with confidence. This time, he did not smile furtively when he got a huge round of applause; he grinned, as pleased with his solo as was the audience.
Drummer Harvel Nakundi, a seventeen-year-old from Miami’s New World School of the Arts, is one-quarter Art Blakey, one-quarter Philly Joe Jones, one quarter Buddy Rich and one-quarter sheer exhuberance in search of consistency. He is a riveting drummer now. When he gets his loose ends tucked in, he will be formidable.
Brian Crutchfield, 17, is a towering Texan from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. His tenor saxophone conception and tone complement his large frame. His solos showed not only an allegience to John Coltrane and Michael Brecker, but also self-editing that allowed his substantial ideas room to blossom. Such discipline is not often a hallmark of post-Coltrane saxophonists.
One of the faculty said of seventeen-year-old trombonist Ismael Cuevas of Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, “Ismael is basically an ear player—but what an ear.” He demonstrated his harmonic acuity, rich sound and range in several contexts.
I was also impressed with guitarist Graham Keir of Wyndmoore, Pennsylvania, and drummer Max Wrightson of Los Angeles, both seventeen. Sixteen-year-old Woody Goss of Skokie, Illinois, is a pianist of depth that reflects his classical training. Pianist Noah Kellman is fourteen. He just finished the eighth grade. His parents, visiting the colony from the family’s home in DeWitt, New York, told me that when he was five, Noah stood watching as his dad played a simple Mozart piece. He asked if he could do it, too. Indulging the boy, his father helped him onto the bench, whereupon Noah played what he had just heard, flawlessly. Lessons ensued. He became a jazz player at the age of ten. Four years later, he is an accomplished jazz accompanist and soloist.
Nadia Washington is a sixteen-year-old senior at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, the school at which Bart Marantz’s jazz program produced Roy Hargrove and Norah Jones, among others. She sings in a clear voice and loves Ella Fitzgerald. One of her pieces Saturday night was a virtual reproduction of Fitzgerald’s famous “How High The Moon” from a Jazz At The Philharmonic recording, right down to Ella’s ad lib about forgetting the words—a neat trick of imitation, but a trick nonetheless. Ms. Washington’s real singing came with the colony big band on Dave and Iola Brubeck’s “Since Love Had Its Way” from The Real Ambassadors. It was a sensitive and poised performance.
As I listened to the encore piece that closed the concert and this year’s colony, I thought of this passage from the chapter, called A Common Language, in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers:

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who play it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources, and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties. In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

The encore was Thelonious Monk’s “Bright Mississippi.” With the colonists and teachers Greg Tardy, Ingrid Jensen and Hal Crook wailing away on the “Sweet Georgia Brown” changes, the barrier was definitely down. All of this may be more than you wanted to know about seventeen astonishingly talented youngsters. I imagine that it is considerably less than you will want to know as the years go by, assuming that the narrow confines of the jazz economy allow them to work as performing artists.

I have had one day at home and in the office following my adventures—Marine and otherwise—on the east coast. This morning, I am flying to Stockton, California. Stockton is the site of the University of the Pacific, home of the Brubeck Institute. I’ll speak at the institute’s Summer Colony for promising young jazz musicians and do two book signings, one at the institute. There will also be a 1 p.m. signing Saturday, August 15, at the Stockton Barnes and Noble store, 4950 Pacific Ave # 319. If you are in the neighborhood or nearby, please join us.
The Summer Colony is funded by Herb Alpert in honor of Paul Desmond. Trumpeter Ingrid Jensen is the colony’s artistic director. The faculty includes trombonist Hal Crook and Dave and Iola Brubeck’s bassist-trombonist-composer son Chris. You can read all about the colony here. I expect to report to you on what I see—and hear.

Shortly after Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond came out, we threw a book party at Elaine’s Restaurant. In his last decade, Paul spent a good deal of his time at that way station of culture and good times on Second Avenue in Manhattan, hanging out with writers and thinking about finishing the book he barely started. Malcolm Harris of Parkside Publications, Dave and Iola Brubeck and I co-hosted the party. Elaine Kaufman, her chief of staff Diane Becker and their crew are known as book party experts, and they made this one special, complete with Desmond solos floating through the room. There were sixty-odd—and some merely interesting—guests. Most of them knew Paul. Some of them played with him. His two favorite guitarists were there. Jim Hall came up from Greenwich Village. Ed Bickert, to everyone’s amazement, left his seclusion in Toronto and came all the way to New York just for the occasion, his gorgeous daughter in tow. Don Thompson, who played with Bickert in Desmond’s last quartet, showed up with the great alto saxophonist John Handy. They were playing at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Handy’s reunited quintet, the one that stunned the jazz world in the sixties. Thompson said he’s been trying to persuade Ed to start playing again. Bickert says it’s too much work.

Arnold Roth, whose incomparable drawings grace the end papers and several pages of Take Five, was there with his wife Caroline. They met Desmond in Philadelphia in the days when the Brubeck Quartet took turns sleeping in the back of Dave’s cavernous old Kaiser Vagabond. The alto saxophonist Jerry Dodgion, who played with Paul in Alvino Rey’s hotel band in 1951, was there, as were the writers Jack Richardson, Nat Hentoff, Whitney Balliett, Ira Gitler, Will Friedwald, Bruce Jay Friedman and James Lincoln Collier. The great singer Jackie Cain reminisced with bassist Bill Crow about Paul’s playing in a medley of Brubeck’s “Summer Song” and Gershwin’s “Summertime” on her and Roy Kral’s Time and Love. Here’s how she tells it in Take Five.

So, at the proper moment, Paul was there, ready. He was warmed up and played it once. He played it so beautifully. I think if he had done other takes, it would have been just as wonderful, but it was so great that there was no need to do another take. So, we stopped and listened to it, and he was happy. We were all happy, in fact delighted, with it. Then he said, “Well, what’s next?” But that was it. That was the only thing he’d been brought in for, to do that one song.

Brubeck entertained The New York Times’ Campbell Robertson with stories about his cowboy youth. Elaine told Robertson about the night Desmond went backward off a bar stool and hit the floor without spilling a drop. George Avakian, who produced many of Desmond’s and Brubeck’s albums, beamed at being with so many of his old friends. Rick Breitenfeld, the cousin who immeasurably enriched the book by unearthing information about Paul’s growing up, circulated chatting with other characters from Desmond’s life. Jean Bach, doyenne of the New York jazz scene, came with Charles Graham, the audio genius who kept Paul’s sound system in shape.
As the evening was winding down, I looked across the dinner table at Brubeck. From the speakers, through the restaurant babble, he and Desmond were at Storyville playing their incomparable, intuitive,1952 duet on “You Go To My Head.” Dave was leaning back with his eyes closed, smiling.