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Following his five years as the bassist in the Bill Evans Trio, Chuck Israels worked with a variety of leaders, among them J.J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock and Hampton Hawes. His repertory orchestra, The National Jazz Ensemble, and his writing for the Metropole Orchestra disclosed his range and depth as an arranger. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2010 after nearly a quarter of a century of teaching music at the university level. It wasn’t long before Israels organized an octet of some of the best musicians in the Pacific Northwest’s rich pool of talent. Much of the band’s music is arranged by Israels based on recorded performances of Evans. In a 2012 review of the band in performance, I wrote:

Translating the music from Evans’ fingers through eighty fingers and eight brains requires more than technical ability in playing and writing, although it must have plenty of that. It demands an understanding of and feeling for the underlying impulses and emotions in the music. [The Audience] was feeling what the musicians felt in the profundity, beauty and joy of Evans’ music.

The Chuck Israels Jazz Orchestra’s repertoire still includes interpretations of Evans, but Israels also applies his methods to other music. A new film portrait by Elijah Hasan captures Israels’ insistence on meticulousness as the band prepares for performance. It also allows the viewer glimpses of his home life, even unto salad-making. I suggest that you schedule adequate time for this 36-minute film. If you can watch it full-screen, so much the better. If you are asked for a password, use: Swing

This album by Israels and his octet is devoted to the music of Bill Evans. His 1970s work with the National Jazz Ensemble is on this CD.

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Bobby Medina, Between Worlds (Medina)

The trumpeter’s album includes much of the repertoire that he and his band played at the recent Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival—with dramatic differences. Orchestras with string sections at sessions in Buenos Aires and Seattle provide soaring accompaniments in arrangements by Medina, pianist Eric Verlinde, saxophonist-flutist Guto Lucena and Lucena’s fellow Brazilian Felipe Salles. To great effect, Salles’ setting of Tony Lujan’s “Forever My Love” alternates dreaminess and zest. Lucena’s arrangements of pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Astor Piazolla capture the composers’ spirits. Medina does the Mexican standard “La Bikina” as a waltz that allows him to double on flugelhorn and accordion.

Soloists include musicians from North and South America. On Piazolla’s “Libertango,” Seattleite Verlinde shines in a piano solo that sets up a dashing chase sequence with Medina and guest trumpeter Gustavo Bergalli from Argentina. Lucena demonstrates the power on flute and soprano saxophone that also informed his playing at Ystad. As the principal soloist, Medina is impressive not only for his command of the trumpet and flugelhorn, but also for the blues feeling often at the heart of his solos whether he’s improvising on traditional Latin music or an attractive hybrid like his “Tullum.”

The story in yesterday’s Rifftides post about Jaki Byard quoted drummer Alan Dawson’s excursion into phrases originated by the late Slim Gaillard. It could be argued that Gaillard was the hippest and most influential of all the hipsters of the 1940s and 1950s. He remained active well into his and the century’s seventh decade. He was an accomplished pianist and guitarist, but the public knew Gaillard best for vocal performances incorporating quirky language that had something in common with English. This piece updates an earlier Rifftides post about one of bebop’s most endearing figures.

In a gathering of people even younger than I, when I mentioned Slim Gaillard three of them said in unison, “Who?”

“Flat Foot Floogie,” I explained, “Cement Mixer, Putti Putti,” “Matzoh ball Oroony,” and—just to make sure they understood—”Poppity Poppity Poppity Pop Go De Motorcycle.”

Their blank stares made me realize that there must be other folks in the 21st century in need of remedial cultural education. We’ll begin with an audiovisual aid.

That was Slim Gaillard on The Tonight Show. The music as he walked off was the theme during Steve Allen’s tenure as host of the program, so it was probably the mid-1950s. By then, Gaillard had behind him a couple of decades of success that began in the late ’30s with Slim and Slam, a duo of Gaillard and bassist Slam Stewart. Their big hits were “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Cement Mixer,” novelties executed with superb musicianship. Columbia’s The Groove Juice Special CD has 20 of their recordings. Later, Gaillard teamed with another bassist, Bam Brown. Their Laughing In Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years has several tracks that include the great bop pianist Dodo Marmarosa and such other guests as Ben Webster, Dick Hyman, Ray Brown and Milt Jackson. Slim Gaillard at Birdland 1951 is a collection of performances when he was a regular at the New York club, with Art Blakey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Terry Gibbs, Brew Moore and others sitting in.

Well aware of Gaillard’s musicianship, the fathers of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, were happy to be guests on his recording session in Los Angeles on December 29, 1945. Gaillard is the pianist and raconteur, Jack McVea the tenor saxophonist, with Bam Brown on bass and Zutty Singleton playing drums in the blues titled “Slim’s Jam,” which is followed by the motorcycle epic.

Accurate information about Gaillard’s earliest years is hard to come by. This Wikipedia article seems to have what is available. If you would like to sample Gaillard’s extensive output of recordings, YouTube has dozens of them. Go here. In his later years, Gaillard sometimes worked as an actor in television shows including Marcus Welby M.D., Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible. He continued to appear in clubs in the US and Great Britain. He died in London in 1991 at age 75.

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A Rifftides reader, composer Michael Robinson, responded to the Monday recommendation of the Jaki Byard Project’s Inch by Inch (see the July 24 post) with a reflection on a Byard performance in a classic Phil Woods album. Mr. Robinson wrote:

One of the greatest jazz albums of all time is Musique du bois by Phil Woods, due in no small part to the appearance of Jaki Byard on piano, in addition to Alan Dawson on drums and Richard Davis on bass. Byard’s intrinsic contribution pertains both to his soloing and accompanying. Check out his performance on this phenomenal rendering of “Willow Weep For Me”:

I was privileged to be in the studio for the recording of Musique du bois, invited by producer Don Schlitten to write notes for the album. The notes were comprehensive, but when 32 Records reissued the music on a CD in 1997, the notes were gutted. Among the many sections left on the cutting room floor was the one that described the making of “Willow Weep For Me.” Therefore, as a public service in memory of a great day in RCA’s Studio B in Manhattan, here is that part of the story.

Woods’ head arrangement of “Willow Weep For Me” begins with the rhythm section playing the introductory pattern used by Miles Davis for “All Blues.” The plan is to continue the figure through the alto solo, but Woods finds it too monotonous. Take one is cut short. There are superior solos on take two from Woods, Byard and Davis, but the leader is interested in supplemental harmonic ideas and goes to the piano to suggest some chords. The third take opens faster, with Davis adding vibrato and Dawson slapping the brushes on his snare drum just enough to impart a happy dance feeling. Woods responds with a sunny solo that is in sharp contrast to the rather brooding statement of the previous take. He introduces a phrase from “Drum Boogie,” chromaticizing it outrageously. Davis solos with an abandon that causes a sharp collective intake of breath in the control room. Byard has a brilliant solo full of Tatum fragments, and the piano sweeps under Woods as he re-enters for a final chorus packed with modulations, piping high notes and gut-rumbling low tones.

“Okay,” Woods tells the control room, “we’ll bring in a brass section to put a chord on the end.”

While the others are listening to “Willow,” Dawson is on the phone to the Aladdin Delicatessen:“Cheese on rye…no sesame seeds in the rye.”

“Perhaps you’d prefer avacado seeds,” suggests an eavesdropper.

“Yes, with hot sauce,” Dawson grins, and he goes into a monologue full of such gustatory Slim Gaillardisms as mosquito knees, hippopotamus lips and reety pooties.

“Slim who?” some of you may be asking. Well, continuing in the spirit of public service, tomorrow’s Rifftides post will bring you up to date or—more accurately—back to date on Slim Gaillard.

As for Musique du bois, the 32 Records CD with truncated liner notes is still available. So too, it turns out, are copies of the LP with the full notes. Go here for information.

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Full disclosure: I wrote a section of the liner notes for a new compilation album by pianist Jan Lundgren. To assure critical objectivity, the senior Rifftides staff asked the veteran Swedish music journalist Jan Olsson to review the CD. Mr. Olsson’s review appears on the Swedish website DIG. We thank him and DIG for permission to post his work, and for his translation into English.

Jan Lundgren: A Retrospective (Fresh Sound)

Besides some CDs and LPs produced in Sweden and Japan, our own master pianist Jan Lundgren has recorded sixteen albums – nine of them under his own name – on the superb and very ambitious Spanish Fresh Sound label, today distributed all over the world. All but one were produced in Los Angeles by the legendary Dick Bank. The exception, Stockholm Get-Together from 1994, was produced by Jan himself.

Mr. Bank has now put together an excellent and varied Lundgren compilation. He has chosen twelve selections from ten of his own Fresh Sound productions, recorded between 1995 and 2003, and he presents them chronologically. He lets us listen to Jan entirely on his own, with his American trios and together with jazz celebrities like Bill Perkins, Conte Candoli, Herb Geller, Andy Martin and, last but not least, Arne Domnérus and Pete Jolly.

To mention any particular selections seems unnecessary since all original albums from which Mr. Bank has made his choices have already been reviewed. But the duo version of “Barney Goin´ Easy”, or “I´m Checkin´ Out Go´om Bye” as the Ellington/Strayhorn composition is also named, with Domnérus on clarinet is really something very special. It is drawn from Dompan!, the album that Arne himself considered his very best ever. The playful collaboration with Jolly is also something that will make you shout with joy— if you love high-quality piano jazz.

The bassists and drummers who enrich the album—in particular the radar pair of Chuck Berghofer and Joe La Barbera—are also well worth praising. And so is Jim Mooney, who is responsible for most of the excellent sound quality. He is a member of the same league as his east coast counterpart Rudy Van Gelder. Lots of roses, also, go to the man with the great ideas, a perpetual preserver of high quality and good taste, Mr. Dick Bank. He is like a manager in the highest Spanish soccer division who knows not only the exact capacity of every player but also how to bring it forth. But the most praise goes, of course, to Jan Lundgren, who today is on the same level as his great Swedish forerunners and sources of inspiration, Jan Johansson and Bengt Hallberg.

Finally: The CD booklet and liner notes to Dick Bank´s albums are always something very special with lots of high-quality and interesting information. This time the authors are Doug Ramsey, Dick Bank and— Jan Lundgren. If you don´t own most of Jan´s Fresh Sound albums already, I think that A Retrospective is, for every jazz piano fan, an almost necessary investigation.

Jan Olsson

Mr. Olsson has been one of Sweden’s most respected journalists for more than fifty years. He has contributed to Orkester Journalen and the Swedish-Danish magazine Jazz Stage. For a quarter of a century he was a regular host on Swedish Radio and on a number of television specials.

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Before Scott LaFaro joined the Bill Evans Trio in late 1959, the young bassist’s second west coast stint included work with Chet Baker, Barney Kessel, Victor Feldman, Cal Tjader, Stan Getz and Hampton Hawes, among others. In California, LaFaro’s tone, time and adventurous ideas put him—along with Gary Peacock and Charlie Haden—in the vanguard of a new generation of bassists who took the instrument a step beyond functional time-keeping and harmonic guidance. With Evans, he would contribute to the development of an interactive approach to the piano trio that helped steer jazz in new directions.

In a May, 1958, recording with pianist Hawes, LaFaro has an eight-bar solo on the bridge section of the penultimate chorus of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” but his swing, the richness of his sound and the fundamental rightness of his note choices are what make his performance here compelling. Harold Land is the tenor saxophonist, Frank Butler the drummer.

After 57 years, Hampton Hawes’ For Real is fresh and undated. It’s a basic repertoire item.

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Thanks to Michael Cuscuna and Mosaic Records for the reminder that yesterday, Johnny Hodges (1906-1970) would have celebrated his 109th birthday. Hodges’ alto saxophone (and in his early career the soprano sax) were so closely associated with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, it is easy to assume that’s where he started. In fact, he left his native Boston in 1924 and worked regularly in New York with his mentor Sidney Bechet, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Lloyd Scott, Chick Webb and Luckey Roberts—among others—before he joined Ellington in the spring of 1928. He became one of the band’s principal soloists and remained so the rest of his life except for four years in the 1950s when he led his own band before he returned to Ellington.

In 1936, the Ellington band recorded one of the composer’s loveliest and least known ballads, “Black Butterfly,” with solos by baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and trombonist Lawrence Brown. The song resurfaced in the late 1960s with Hodges as the featured soloist. Let’s listen to the originally issued take of “Black Butterfly,” then watch the video of Hodges and the Ellington band playing it in Berlin in 1969, the year before Hodges’ death.

“Black Butterfly” is included in this essential Mosaic collection of Ellington’s Brunswick and Columbia recordings from the 1930s.

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Excitement about the impending trip to Sweden for the Ystad Jazz Festival grew a bit when the festival’s Itta Johnson sent Lucas Gohlen’s photographs of the monastery known as Gråbrödraklostret (Greyfriars Abbey). It is one of the oldest buildings in that ancient town. Its construction started in 1267. In the seven centuries since, it has been a Franciscan monastery, a poorhouse, a distillery, a granary, a candidate for demolition, a museum and one of southern Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions.

In the late 1800s the municipality bought the monastery buildings. A few years later they were ordered demolished. Protests from the townspeople saved the monastery. Restoration work took most of the twentieth century. Sometimes the wisdom of ordinary people saves the day. Just imagine—if that demolition order had held, this rose garden would not exist.

Hooray for the common folk. They rescued the oldest monastery in Sweden.
For details about the Ystad festival, go here and follow the links.

For one of Sweden’s most beloved pieces of music, listen to Scott Hamilton and a Scandinavian rhythm section play “Ack Värmeland, Du Sköna.” The pianist is Jan Lundgren, the artistic director of the Ystad Festival. Jesper Lundgaard is the bassist, Kristian Leth the drummer. You may know the song better as “Dear Old Stockholm.”

Hamilton’s album is Swedish Ballads…& More.

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Answering one word in my Wall Street Journal piece yesterday about Willis Conover, Matt Armstrong (pictured) posted on his blog a clarification of the effect of the Smith-Mundt Act. Mr. Armstrong is a member of the Broadcating Board of Governors, which oversees the U.S. Government’s civilian international media, including the Voice of America. In the WSJ article, I wrote that the 1948 Smith-Mundt legislation forbids the Voice of America “from broadcasting within the U.S.” He defends my right to use the term “forbids” and says it is “the conventional wisdom.” Then he writes at length about the application of Smith-Mundt in practice and about Senator William Fullbright and others in the congress objecting to the whole concept of the VOA and changing Smith-Mundt. “In the end,” he writes, “there is a little irony in that the great Willis Conover, the cultural diplomat, is unknown to Americans because of Senator Fulbright, the celebrated champion of exchanges.”

There is much more in Mr. Armstrong’s long essay about the history of Smith-Mundt, Senator Karl Mundt’s role in promoting what eventually was called the Fullbright Act, about the VOA and public diplomacy in general. To read it, go here.