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Welcome to the new, improved, more functional Rifftides. Artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan and his team spiffed us up as the pioneer site (aka guinea pig) in reformatting all of the artsjournal.com blogs. The Rifftides staff thanks them for a dazzling makeover.

There is a change in the comments procedure. You will still click on the “Comments” link below each item. That takes you to a simple form. After you have filled in the form, you will be asked to enter a couple of words in a box before you submit the comment. If all works as planned, that will end the tsunami of spam that has plagued us for months. The Rifftides staff encourages you to try it out.

You may also correspond using the “Contact me” link in the first of the two right-hand columns. Either way, please let us know how you like the new Rifftides. For your celebratory opening-day bonus, click on this link for video of a Thelonious Monk piece by pianist Jessica Williams.

For weeks, the CD reissue of Phineas Newborn, Jr.’s 1961 album A World of Piano! has been propped up near my computer as a reminder to post something about him. It is neither his birthday (December 14, 1931) nor the anniversary of his death (May 26, 1989), and no recently discovered Newborn recording has been released, but we need no special occasion to remember his astonishing talent.

Because he was sporadically troubled by emotional instability, Newborn’s career was spotty. He never got the recognition his virtuosity might have brought him if his health had been on an even keel. Still, from the time the young man from Memphis debuted with Lionel Hampton in 1950, musicians and informed listeners were aware that he was a phenomenon. He made a splash in New York in the mid-fifties when Count Basie and the producer-promoter John Hammond gave him a boost. He worked in a duo with Charles Mingus and played with the bassist on the soundtrack of John Cassevetes’ celebrated art film Shadows. His recordings on RCA, Atlantic, Roulette, Steeplechase, Pablo and a smattering of other labels remain available and sell steadily if modestly. Few serious jazz pianists are without Newborn shelves in their collections.

Through the ’60s and ’70s he recorded a series of albums for Contemporary, at first as a sideman with Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards, then four under his own name. Concord Records, the custodian of the Newborn Contemporary CDs, has allowed several of them to drop out of the Original Jazz Classics catalogue. Some of them have resurfaced as imports and may be found, along with other Newborns, at this web site. It would be difficult to go wrong with any of them. There are, as far as I can determine, no Phineas Newborn albums worthy of fewer than four-and-a-half stars out of five. You will find his complete discography here.

A few clips of Newborn playing with the monumental bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Kenny Dennis have shown up on You Tube. They all seem to come from the Jazz Scene USA televison program hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr., in the early 1960s. If you’re unfamiliar with Newborn, try “Oleo” for an introduction to the piston-perfect technique of his fast playing and “Lush Life” for proof that his harshest critics were wrong when they accused him of being without feeling.

As for the pronunciation of Newborn’s first name, it has been solidly established by family and close friends that he preferred “Fín-uhs” (as in “finest”).

Moscow, Idaho
The program bloat that kept some Friday concertgoers in their seats until early Saturday dissipated by Saturday night. The final Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival concert was trim and full of excitement provided by two big bands. The ad hoc performance hall in a field house the size of a dirigible hangar was outfitted with dance floors on either side. Throughout the evening, the floors were crowded with members of the hip-hop generation grooving to music with roots in the swing era.
The Lionel Hampton band and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra performed separately and together. The Hamptonians included members closely associated with Hampton before his death in 2002, among them the impressive young trombonist Clarence Banks, vibraharpist Chuck Redd and the entertaining drummer Wally “Gator” Watson. In addition to its instrumentals, the band backed pianist and singer Dee Daniels in two soul-inflected vocals and Jon Hendricks scatting that most basic of Hampton jump tunes, “Hey Bob A Rebop.”
Artistic director John Clayton, his alto saxophonist brother Jeff and Jeff Hamilton, the festival’s apparently inexhaustible house drummer, unleashed their explosive big band in a set alive with deep swing and superb solo work. Charles Owens and Ricky Woodard had a testosteronic tenor battle on “Jazz Party.” 89-year-old Snooky Young
riveted the audience–and his fellow band members–with his plunger trumpet solo on “I Be Serious ’bout Dem Blues,” which also had exciting choruses by Jeff Clayton, Woodard, the veteran trombonist George Bohanon and the 21-year-old guitar discovery Graham Dechter. John Clayton dedicated “Squatty Roo” to the late bassist Ray Brown, who for years was a mainstay of the Hampton festival. Trumpeters Clay Jenkins and Gilbert Castellanos were impressive and distinctively different from one another on that classic Johnny Hodges “I Got Rhythm” variant. The piece incorporated a passage of quiet intensity from the rhythm section of Hamilton, pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty, who in their other life are the Jeff Hamilton Trio. Singer Kevin Mahogany was at the top of his bass-baritone game sitting in on “Route 66” and “One For My Baby.”
Following intermission and the introduction of outstanding student soloists from the Hampton Festival’s extensive educational activities, came a rare event. The big bands together played two of the arrangements from First Time!, the 1961 recording by the Count Basie and Duke Elllington bands. Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “Battle Royal” (those “Rhythm” changes again) was highlighted by a good-natured, often hilarious, drum competition between Watson and Hamilton. In the gorgeous Thad Jones ballad “To You,” George Bohanon soloed movingly in the trombone spot filled by Quentin “Butter” Jackson on the Ellington-Basie recording.
Finally (well, almost finally), Chuck Redd, playing Lionel Hampton’s vibes, led the way into “Flyin’ Home,” thirty-two men swinging hard on Hamp’s theme song. As they eased into “What A Wonderful World,” backing the recorded voice of Hampton singing, the big screens in the hall showed a montage of photos of this year’s festival performers in action. Then the bands segued into “Happy Birthday” in honor of Hampton’s 100th and the crowd of 5,000 joined in. The montage dissolved into video and still photographs of Hampton through the years as confetti and streamers wafted down onto the crowd, sparkling in the lights that swept the auditorium. It was a spectacular finish.
As for the reason Lionel Hampton involved himself with the festival in the first place, after the festival University of Idaho Provost Doug Baker summed up the importance of the educational component,.

The clinics and competitions are the major part of the festival for the students. It is inspiring to see them grow during the week and to see the joy of the musicians teaching them.

Being among those 10,000 children, watching them in rapt attention, hearing them play, dodging them in hallways, on campus paths and downtown streets as they darted from event to event, made for a stimulating, rejuvenating, week.

Snooky Young, whose one solo at the Lionel Hampton Festival was a highlight of the entire week, has been exciting people with his trumpet playing since he was a teenaged member of the Wilberforce Collegians. During the swing era, when it was not unusual for sidemen to become famous, he was one of the best known members of Jimmie Lunceford’s influential band. He went on to work with Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Les Hite, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, Gerald Wilson, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland and the Tonight Show band. Young was the prototype of the great lead trumpeter who was also a distinguished soloist. One memorable night on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson wished Young a happy birthday and brought him down front to play and sing. You can see and hear him in his triumphal moment in this video clip.

Another independent book store is dying of competition from the internet and chain stores and from the rising cost of big city real estate. This time, the victim is one of the world’s great book stores. At the end of April, Dutton’s, in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, will be no more. That will be a sad day for dedicated readers and for thousands of authors, including this one, who launched their books with signings at Dutton’s. The friendly store on San Vicente Boulevard is where Jazz Matters first saw the light of day. From today’s story in The Los Angeles Times:

In an interview, author John Rechy, who recently appeared at Dutton’s for his memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” spoke of the store’s importance.
“Every non-million-selling writer has had his coming-out there,” he said. “They had every single book that you would want.”
Author Carolyn See described the store’s decline and looming closing as “just sickening.”
She said she prized the spot as a neighborhood meeting place, not just for literati but also for local dog walkers. “If you weren’t the drinking kind,” See said, “you could go there the way you’d go to a bar.”

To read the whole story, go here. Condolences to Doug Dutton, whose love of books, readers and writers is a calling, not just a business. For more than two decades, his store has been a refuge from a publishing industry and big box stores that market books the way McDonald’s markets hamburgers.

Your itinerant correspondent is back from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, catching his breath, attacking stacks of mail and, generally, taking care of business. We’ll have a final installment about the festival in the next posting, probably tomorrow.

In the meantime, a diversion. A serious listener among you discloses that he was unaware of the uncanny similarity of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” to the main theme of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. For him, and for anyone who knows the Monk piece but not the Strauss, I recommend a National Public Radio feature about Till Eulenspiegel. It begins with Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa Peka Salonen discussing the piece and leads into a full performance of one of the most delightful compositions of the twentieth century. The big, probably unanswerable, question is whether the similarity is coincidental or Monk was inspired by Strauss. For the NPR program, click here and then click on “Hear The Performance.” The “Straight No Chaser” soundalike theme comes at 3:59 into the clip.
For a video performance of “Straight No Chaser” by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, go here.

Artistic director John Clayton has packed the main concerts of the Lionel Hampton festival with so much talent that when the evenings end, the posted 10:30 p.m. closing time is a distant memory. Friday’s concert theme was “Masters and Mentors.” It wrapped up at 12:45 a.m after an energetic, often hilarious, vocal set by Jon Hendricks, his daughter Aria and the impresssive emerging singer Sachal Vasandani. Vasandani was affecting in a slow “How Am I To Know” and joined the Hendrickses to summon up the sound and spirit of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in “Centerpiece” and “Everybody’s Boppin’.” The ranking master of the evening waspianist Hank Jones, playing beautifully in his 90th year. His two-piano duet partners, sixty-odd years younger, were Gerald Clayton and Taylor Eigsti. Each of the three also played a solo piece. John Clayton joined him on bass and Jones performed “Satin Doll” with notable vigor, Clayton bowing a solo.
Opening the concert, Hamond B3 organist Atsuko Hashimoto and drummer Jeff Hamilton backed the venerable tenor saxophonist Red Holloway. Holloway’s patented choruses had some members of the audience singing along. Hashimoto and Hamilton developed a tidal wave of swing in their tag ending to “It’s The Good Life,” leading Holloway to ask, “How do you follow that?” He answered with “Shiny Stockings” and the suggestive “Locksmith Blues,” recruiting the audience in a call and response routine.
Not many years ago Sara Gazarek regularly attended the festival as a student musician. Her career on the rise, she returned Friday night as a professional, singing three songs, with particularly good articulation and smooth control in “More.” Dee Daniels, a perennial artist at the Hampton Festival, followed with three pieces in her powerful gospel-influenced style. Then Gazarek and Daniels, fellow Seattlites, collaborated in a duet on “You Are My Sunshine.” Pianist Josh Nelson contributed a fine solo.
Next up were two new trombonists and one revered veteran. Ismael Cuevas and Ryan Porter, young Los Angeles players discovered by Clayton, each played an original composition. In his “Baila Hacia Este,” Cuevas employed sunny, dancing phrases. With his big, blowsy tone, Porter drew broader strokes in “Sortie.” Then Curtis Fuller arrived for a stunning solo on “Caravan,” a feature from his days with Art Blakey. The set ended with the three combined in a medium-tempo blues, trading phrases in a rousing trombone conversation. They were backed by pianist Bill Charlap, bassist Peter Washington, guitarist Graham Dechter and Hamilton, a fully employed and unfailingly interesting house rhythm section.
Now, attempting to stay abreast of a festival with too much music: Thursday night’s concert began with bebop by the festival all-star rhythm section and ended with a set of irresistibly funky pieces by Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor. In between, listeners in the University of Idaho’s Kibbie Dome heard bright young players, including a surprising chamber group. Charlap, Dechter, Washington and Hamilton warmed the crowd with Dizzy Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High.” Hamilton, a listening drummer, paid Dechter the compliment of building a solo break around a phrase the guitarist created near the end of his improvisation. The house band’s Friday night feature was “Stompin’ At The Savoy,” with a solo by Washington that deserved the extended applause the near-capacity crowd gave him.
The vibraharpist Warren Wolf joined the all-stars both nights. Thursday, he played pieces closely associated with the festival’s namesake. Wolf estabished a melodic approach to the familiar changes of “How High The Moon” for two lyrical choruses before he introduced complexity, double-time flourishes and lightning speed with the mallets. He began his long solo on “Indiana” at top speed, incorporated a couple of effective stop-time choruses and couldn’t resist a “Donna Lee” quote near the end. Wolf illuminated his Friday night set with the quartet in a sensitive duet with Charlap on the verse to “Lush Life.” For a sample of this stimulating young player’s approach to the vibes, click here.
The rhythm section stayed in place to accompany three alto saxophonists, one whose professional career is launched, two in their teens. Seventeen-year-old Isaiah Morfin tore into his “Praise The Lord” with an unaccompanied virtuoso cadenza, then a solo with Charlap, Hamilton and company that was a melange of Jimmy Dorsey high notes, Jackie McLean bebop, Earl Bostic expansiveness, Ornette Coleman abstraction and, possibly, other alto players I missed because they went by too fast. When Isaiah finds Morfin, he could be formidable. Tia Fuller, riding on success with her CD Healing Space and a tour with the pop singer Beyonce, was fast, modal and immersed in shifting meters on “Breakthrough.” At her workshop earlier in the day, Fuller mentioned admiration for Kenny Garrett that was apparent in her energetic performance. Then came Grace Kelly, a high school sophomore who at fifteen has arrived at maturity, personal and musical poise and a completely formed conception. I encountered her in a jam session at this festival last year and struggled to accept that this little girl was producing bebop of the quality I was hearing. Later, a CD confirmed that the impression was not generated by the wine I was drinking. A year older, Ms. Kelly is even better. Her playing on “Filosophical Flying Fish” and in jamming with Morfin and Fuller on “Flyin’ Home” was among the best at the Hampton festival, regardless of style or age.
With her set of four pieces mostly from the 2006 CD I’ll Be Seeing You, violinist Regina Carter thrilled the audience–and kept the full attention of the musicians and assorted hangers-on in the backstage listening area. The ingenious arrangements for her quintet, the swing and sense of adventurous fun, were infectious. The band turned “Little Brown Jug” and “A Tisket, a Tasket” into chance-taking excursions through time-worn material harmonically updated to a state of freshness and surprise. Pianist Xavier Davis, clarinetist Darryl Harper, bassist Matthew Parrish and drummer Alvester Garnett were in synch with Carter’s skill and her enthusiasm. Davis’s chord choices in support of Carter’s heartbreakingly beautiful solo on Ravel’s “Pavanne For A Dead Princess” evoked Bill Evans, as did his own solo. The band’s closer was a transcription of Charlie Shavers’ arrangement for the John Kirby Sextet of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance,” uncannily accurate, swinging and delightful. This was forty minutes of superior chamber music.
Following intermission (now you’re beginning to believe that these were long concerts), festival favorite Roberta Gambarini sang three songs with the house rhythm section minus Bill Charlap. Her accompanist Tamir Hendelman took over the piano. Impeccable and musicianly as usual, Gambarini did lively versions of “Nobody Else But Me” and “I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You,” and a contemplative “Day Dream” enhanced by her remarkably faithful impression of a trombone solo, produced by clever microphone technique, hand placement and voice projection. Gambarini and Hendelman are all over the festival schedule, not only in concerts but also giving workshops and master classes.
Roy Hargrove opened his set with a plaintive flugelhorn solo belying the excitement that he and his RH Factor were about to unleash. Flugelhorn back on its stand, trumpet armed and ready, he launched into a set of latterday rhythm and blues laced with inventive jazz solos by Hargrove and the other members of an inspired funk band.Thin as a whip, dressed in cap, shades, plaid shirt, jeans and red sneakers, Hargrove bopped, hopped and glided around the stage when he wasn’t playing. When he was playing, he was brilliant and when he sang, he was very good. Some years ago, I heard the first edition of RH Factor. I found it strained, fragmented, overamplified, annoying. This band is the real thing, an embodiment of rhythm, focused but loose, musical, enormously invigorating, great fun. Hargrove did not announce the names of the tunes. It didn’t matter. Pianist Gerald Clayton, baritone saxophonist Jason Marshall, alto saxophonist Bruce Williams and guitarist Todd Parsnow all soloed impressively, as did bassist Lenny Stallworth and drummer Jason (JT) Thomas. But it was the unified R&B totality of the group that made Hargrove’s forty-five minutes memorable.
In after-hours sessions at the main festival hotel, Hargrove and most of the members of his band jammed with guitaristJohn Stowell, alto saxophonist Grace Kelly, members of the all-star Russian group so prominent at the Hampton festival, pianist Kuni Mikami, and trombonists Greg Schrader and Ismael Cuevas, to mention only a few. At one point, Stowell found himself as, in effect, the eighth member of the Hargrove band. Known for the sensitivity and finesse of his playing, for a few tunes he was as hard a hard bopper as Hargrove and his colleagues. Stowell raised a few eyebrows.

Tuesday evening’s opening event of the Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival was in the University of Idaho Auditorium, a hall intriguing for its neo-Gothic architecture and superb acoustics. Called Hamp’s Gala, the concert presented students of the Lionel Hampton School of Music. The first half was classical, the second jazz.
Following the university orchestra playing the final two movements of Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 came five recital pieces. They included virtuoso trombone playing by Jenny Kellogg in Ferdinand David’s “Concertino” and ended with Josiah Stocker’s peformance of “Four Pieces For Piano” by the contemporary American composer Frederic Rzewski. I must confess to having known nothing of Rzewski, but after hearing Stocker’s presentation of this work with its riveting rhythms, insistent repetitions and complex interior harmonies, I am going to seek out more of the composer’s music.The intensity, rapid tempos and open structure of the Rzewski work make demands on the pianist’s technique and on his ability to maintain focus on the music through the blizzard of notes. Young Mr. Stocker brought it off impressively. There is on You Tube a video clip of Rzewski himself playing an excerpt from “Four Pieces,” but – fair warning – the audio qualilty is lousy and the clip cuts off abruptly before he gets to the harmonic density of the middle section. Don’t judge the piece by that clip. The web site samples of this recording of “Four Pieces” seem to be more representative. Among the few things I’ve learned about Rzewski today in hasty research is that his name is pronounced zheff-skee.
Following intermission, Daniel Bukvich of the Hampton School faculty directed the Jazz Choir I in an overture and two pieces of his composing. The overture was a wild thing that opened with a percussion ensemble onstage, then the 175 men and women of the choir swarming down the aisles through the audience and onto the stage, singing, clapping and grooving as they went. The jubilation continued through “Inferno,” which Bukvich set to text from Dante, and his own “Song of the River.” Then Vern Sielert led a big band that played three pieces highlighted by an expansion of Jelly Roll Morton’s 1926 “Black Bottom Stomp,” a period piece that is timeless. Jenny Kellogg, who flawlessly played the classical piece in the first half, had what Sielert described as “the world’s shortest trombone solo” (two bars); from Ferdinand David to Ferdinand Joseph Lamenthe in one concert. Sielert’s Jazz Band I also delivered stirring performances of the tricky “Linebacker” by Fred Sturm and Dick Grove’s “You Rotten Kid,” a flagwaver from the Buddy Rich book. The festival was off to a spirited start.
Further reports are coming. Stay tuned.

Jessica Williams sent a link to a video clip of Garner, one of her piano heroes, with his trio in 1966. The subject line of her message was, “You’ll Love This.”
The message was, “Is this cool or what?”
It’s cool. Go here to see and hear it.

In jazz improvisation, speed for the sake of speed is often self-defeating. Beyond a certain velocity, fingers tend to outrun brains. The automatic pilot kicks in and a musician ends up merely–as a standard phrase in the critic’s lexicon has it–running the changes. Even Art Tatum and Charlie Parker had episodes of auto-pilotitis when fast tempos produced visceral excitement and little else.
Saturday evening at The Seasons, I heard the Bill Charlap Trio play “In The Still Of The Night” at a clip unmeasurable by a metronome unless it could register well over 320 beats a minute. Following Charlap’s piano introduction spiced with allusions to Thelonious Monk, he, Peter Washington and Kenny Washington were off like synchronized rockets.

Through chorus after chorus, despite the tempo Charlap fulfilled Lester Young’s ideal for soloists; he told a story, never falling into content deficit. That wasn’t the only fast performance of the evening. The trio took Irving Berlin’s “The Best Thing For You,” Cole Porter’s “All Through The Night,” George Gershwin’s “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and Charlie Parker’s “Passport” at rapid tempos, but “In The Still Of The Night” must have come close to setting a new land speed record for piano trios.

 

 

 

Bill Charlap   Peter Washington   Kenny Washington

It seemed to me that in medium-tempo pieces and in ballads, there was more subtle interaction among Charlap’s piano, Kenny W’s drums and Peter W’s bass than when I have heard the band before. Porter’s rarely heard “Where Have You Been” was achingly beautiful. As in the trio’s recent Village Vanguard recording, George Wallington’s “Godchild,” drew on Gerry Mulligan’s famous Birth Of The Cool arrangement. The encore–only two days late–was “My Funny Valentine,” taken slowly. In an effective departure, Charlap interpolated the song’s verse as a solo interlude,.
If Keith Jarrett hadn’t taken the name, The Standards Trio could describe Charlap’s group. Their repertoire is largely based in classic American songs to which audiences relate. Within those recognizable frameworks, Charlap and the Washingtons create new music. It’s a formula whose success is enhanced by three superior musicians whose decade of experience together results in unusual empathy. Every time I’ve heard them lately, they’re better. And faster.

This week, I’ll be reporting from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho and the Portland Jazz Festival in Oregon. It will be the first Hampton festival completely under the direction of its new major domo, John Clayton. Because the events overlap, I’ll be getting to Portland for only the last two days of the festival’s ten. The good news is that I’ll get to hear Nancy King (with Kurt Elling and Steve Chrisopherson), Anat Cohen and Joshua Redman.

The artsjournal.com technical team has restored the Rifftides comments section. The staff thanks them profusely. You will find a comments link at the end of each post. You are welcome to also comment directly by e-mail.
Please do.

To read a Rifftides post about bassist Dennis Irwin’s predicament, click here. Mike Quinn of Jazz Times writes:

I’ve built and posted a website for Dennis Irwin, my old high school
buddy. Will be adding more material this coming week since I’m
heading to NYC for three weeks to attend both benefits. The site
contains some bio stuff, some video and a donation page which allows
direct PayPal donations. Will post fotos of Vanguard gig on Tuesday.
This is the Irwin web site.

There is a baritone saxophonist in Spain who sounds amazingly like Gerry Mulligan. Rifftides reader Tyler Newcomb sent the alert:

Man, that Joan Chamorro plays so much like Gerry, if you closed your eyes you’d swear it was him. Plays just behind the beat like Mulligan, improvises the same type of lines and ideas, and his sound is drop-dead the same. All he needs is some red hair to go on tour with a Chet Baker clone and recreate the original Quartet.

This is a link to Chamorro’s quartet playing, “Bernie’s Tune,” “Love Me Or Leave Me” and, somewhat less successfuly, “Makin’ Whoopee.” All of the pieces were staples of the early Mulligan quartet repertoire. The tape runs out before “Love Me Or Leave Me” finishes. The other players are Toni Belenguer, trombone; David Mengual, bass; and David Xirgu, drums. Chamorro’s channeling of Mulligan is uncanny, but for originality of ideas, pay close attention to Belenguer. Things are happening in Barcelona. The video opens with less than a minute of Ben Webster’s tune “Go Home.”
Searching the web for more about Chamorro, I came across this short video clip of him playing the bass saxophone not on a stand, as most bass saxophonists do, but holding the monster–a feat in itself. Maybe confining his playing to the baritone range makes the horn seem lighter.

You Tube may have removed all of its Chet Baker videos, but it turns out that there is still Baker to be seen and heard on the web. Two days late, we are able to link you, after all, to a Japanese site that has Chet singing and playing “My Funny Valentine” in a superior performance from late in his career. Only the bassist, Heyn Ven De Geyn, is identified. The pianist is likely to be Harold Danko. If you know who the drummer is, please send an e-mail message.
Comment
Ty Newcomb writes:

LINE-UP:
Chet Baker – trumpet, vocal.
Harold Danko – piano
Hein van de Gein – bass
John Engels – drums

(I thought that solo sounded familiar. It is available on a CD, the brilliant Chet Baker In Tokyo. Recorded in 1987, the year before he died, his playing on that concert is proof that even toward the end of his life, which was a study in self abuse, Baker was never a burnt-out case musically. — DR)

First Published July 8, 2005

A reader of Rifftides or Take Five (both, I hope) has been listening to Jim Hall’s 1974 Concierto CD in which Hall’s sidemen are Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. She sent a message asking a question at which musicians tend to guffaw when civilians ask it, one that arises out of genuine interest and does not deserve scorn. Here’s the exchange:
Q: The track “Concierto de Aranjuez” is hauntingly beautiful. Do the musicians totally improvise, or do they each have a kind of musical outline around which they create? You can guess from the question I’m not a musician, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.
A. Except in the most unfettered avant garde improvisation, there must be a plan or the result will be random noise, which, come to think of it, describes the most unfettered avant garde improvisation. Virtually every piece of music has some sort of tonal organization, whether or not there is a formal chord structure. In the case of “Concierto” on the Jim Hall album, the musicians improvise around the simple and quite lovely harmonies that Joaquin Rodrigo wrote into the adagio section of his famous “Concierto de Aranjuez.”

There’s more. To read the whole thing, go here.
Comment

Was she the cousin of the airline stew who asked PD, “How many people are there in your quartet?”?
Concierto is my nomination for the greatest jazz combo LP/CD in the most recent generation (since 1975). Not only their jazz version of the Aranjuez second movement, but also “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” the lead track, I think. Baker-Desmond counterpoint, Steve Gadd’s fills gloved to the soloists’ lines, Roland Hanna flying effortlessly in the last of the solo turns….
Charlton Price

“My Funny Valentine” was one of Chet Baker’s signature songs, and I’d love to give you a link to a clip of him singing or playing it. Sorry, that’s not possible. A few days ago You Tube removed all of its Baker videos because of a copyright wrangle, so I looked to see who else they have performing the piece. It turns out there are dozens of versions on You Tube, maybe hundreds; I quit sampling them after the fourteenth page. You may have better things to do than roam through all of the possibilities, so here are links to six of the better ones. To watch, click on the name of the performer.
J.J Johnson with Rob Schneiderman, piano; Rufus Reid, bass; Akira Tana, drums.
Keith Jarrett, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums.
Duke Ellington’s band with solos by Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet, and Quentin Jackson, trombone.
Paolo Fresu, Flugelhorn, assisted by an unidentified trumpeter who may be Franco Ambrosetti.
Wynton Marsalis in 1980 at age 19, with Art Blakey’s band. The pianist is James Williams.
Tony Bennett with Buddy Rich, drums; Ralph Sharon, piano; an unidentified tenor saxophonist and a bassist who looks like John Burr.
Happy Valentine’s Day.

If you live in or plan to visit the Washington, DC, area, you may be interested in this communique from a Rifftides reader:

There is a fabulous exhibit titled “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World” coming up at the Meridian International Center in Washington, DC. Aside from material covered in Penny Von Eschen’s book*, there will be previously-not-publicly-shown photos on display. Here is a link to the exhibit:
Katja

*Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard)

Whether sponsored by the State Department or off to see the world on their own, the Dave Brubeck Quartet practiced their share of cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and ’60s. You Tube, that never-ending source of surprises and occasional frustrations, has come up with video of the DBQ on a 1962 Australian television program. The story goes that the tape of the show was lost for more than two decades and barely saved from destruction once it was found. It includes contrived conversations that, like the host’s introductions, sound scripted. Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello appear amused by the awkward show-biz schtick. Their playing is correspondingly light-hearted.
The program includes a rarity in the Brubeck canon, a guest vocalist, Laurie Loman, who manages to lose track of the number of bars in “When You’re Smiling.” Unfazed, Desmond follows with a solo on a song he may have been playing for the first time. He works in a quote from “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” perfect for the circumstances. The program is divided into seven You Tube segments, all of which you will find on this page.
Brubeck disbanded the quartet in 1967, so he could devote his time and energy to composing long-form works. The next year he completed his oratorio The Light In The Wilderness, which he still presents when he can marshal the musical troops it requires. He gave the piece its fortieth-anniversary performance last night in Athens, Georgia. As usual, his wife is on the road with him. In The Atlanta Journal-Constituion Bo Emerson has a story about Brubeck working with an orchestra and chorus to prepare the piece.

Iola Brubeck is in the adjoining room at the Holiday Inn in Athens, working on a laptop, busy writing the history of the man she married 65 years ago. A laptop? Dave Brubeck doesn’t mess around with that kind of keyboard. Says his longtime conductor Russell Gloyd, “Dave has trouble with the pause button on his tape player.”
The tape player may outfox him, but Brubeck handles larger forces with aplomb. During a weeklong residency at the University of Georgia, which continues through Friday, he will (with Gloyd’s assistance) command a 140-voice choir, a full-sized symphony orchestra, a big band, a jazz vocal ensemble and his quartet.

To read all of Emerson’s story, go here.
Comment On The Australian Video

In 1962 I was still at school in New Zealand,and I flew up from my home
town to Auckland in a DC-3 so I could see the concert.
They must have gone to New Zealand either before or after the Australia
tour.
I still have the program somewhere!
John Pickworth