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For a couple of hundred years, newspapers used courtesy titles. Many papers that equated Abraham Lincoln with the devil often wrote about “Mr. Lincoln” or “The President,” even as their editorials pilloried him. Up until about the time of Ronald Regan, in news columns and in radio and television newscasts, whoever was president received the respect of title. The operating theory in most of US journalism was that the office warrants respect regardless of the politics and policies of its occupant.

Sometime in the 1970s or early ‘80s, liberationists of various persuasions pressured news organizations (or, if you insist, “the media”) to drop “Mrs.,” ”Miss,” “Mr,” “Dr.” and so forth. Their argument was that the titles offended an emerging sense that such distinctions are discriminatory, offensive to equality. Listening to the news on National Public Radio this morning, I found myself wincing every time anchors and field reporters called the president “Obama.” Today, after the first reference, we rarely hear or see titles, even when the second reference is to the President of The United States.

Among the few exceptions in print are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. I must acknowledge NPR’s Morning Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. Mr. Simon uses titles when he refers to people in news stories and interviews.

As for equality, I have never heard the argument for courtesy titles put better than the late Norman Isaacs put it in 1985. A former chairman of the National News Council and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Mr. Isaacs (pictured) was the keynote speaker at the first of a series of journalism ethics conferences that I put together for the Foundation for American Communications (FACS). His audience was a roomful of high-powered editors, publishers, reporters, journalism critics and educators. Here is an excerpt from his talk:

Do courtesy titles matter? A Howard University professor recently came up to me and said, “I don’t know of a black man or woman of substance who doesn’t wince when seeing his or her name in print and who is referred to only by the last name after the first full name reference. It takes their minds back to the days when we were all called ‘boy.’” I was taken by surprise by his candor and passion on the subject, yet I shouldn’t have been surprised. I have run into so many snide and negative comments about the practice that I feel we do great damage to the psyche of the citizenry at large. What does a young boy think when his father accomplishes something of merit and is called “Wilson” in the newspaper report? Can the boy address his teacher by only a last name? The Roper organization has done two recent polls on this matter. Both show widespread disapproval of the absence of courtesy titles. More telling, the disapproval is remarkably high among women who do not have college degrees. Do editors care? I pray so. I hope they care more about the families who buy their newspapers than the young staff reporters who hold such strong ideas about what newspaper policies ought to be.

Mr. Isaacs went on to quote studies that Kristen McGraff, president of Minnesota Opinion Research Incorporated, did for the ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors.

She traced a large part of the credibility gap to the young transient reporters on staff. Young transients, she said, often have views and opinions that counter the views and opinions of people who buy and read the newspaper. This is also true of the millions who watch TV. The credibility gap is real and it runs damn deep.

In 2013 are young transient reporters committed to social change still driving the idea that courtesy titles in print and broadcast news are undemocratic? Do three decades with courtesy titles all but banished mean that they are gone forever? The name of that conference was Journalism Ethics: Why Change? The question it implied is worth asking today, when ratings and circulation are declining:

Why not change?

Gerald Wilson celebrated his 95th birthday yesterday. He looks back on a career studded with achievement as a trumpeter, bandleader, composer and pioneering arranger. Early on in his writing Wilson achieved the unexpected, incorporating daring classical harmonic techniques in his big band arrangements and making them accessible to general audiences. He is the personification of a lifelong learner. Following big successes capped by a sold-out tour with Ella Fitzgerald, Wilson dissolved his successful post-World War II big band because he thought he needed more study. From my notes for Mosaic’s 5-CD set of Wilson’s Pacific Jazz recordings (out of print but available as an MP3 download), here is a section about that period in the forties when he had reached the top.

He thought he had got there too soon. In 1947, he disbanded. “I decided when I closed with Ella that I was going to have to study some more. I wanted to be able to write anything,” he told NPR’s Jazz Profiles. “I wanted to be able to write for the symphony orchestra, I wanted to write for the movies, I wanted to write for television. I wanted to be able to do it with great speed, great accuracy, and that’s what I did. But I didn’t stop playing.”

Wilson holed up with scores, analyzing works by Stravinsky, Debussy, Falla, Ravel, Kabalevsky, Khatchaturian, Bartok. In a prodigy of self-teaching, he absorbed the techniques of those classical masters. He would apply their lessons for all the years of his long career. He achieved each of his goals, including works for symphony orchestra, motion pictures and TV, but especially writing prolifically for big bands, his own and others. Half a year into his study exile, he got a call from another leader asking him for help. It was Duke Ellington. He wrote for Ellington off and on for most of the rest of Duke’s life, and occasionally filled out the trumpet section when Ellington needed an additional horn. Later in 1948, he joined Count Basie, playing and writing. “That was study, too,” he says, “sitting where swing really happened. That great rhythm section was really the common denominator for swing.” After Basie disbanded in 1949, Wilson joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. For Basie he wrote the lovely ballad “Katy” and with Basie composed “St. Louis Baby.” For Gillespie he arranged “Guarachi Guaro” which became influential in the development of Latin jazz in the forties and had a second life when Cal Tjader adapted it in the fifties. During all of that extracurricular activity Wilson continued studying and preparing for his next steps.

The next steps included the 1950s Wilson band loaded with soloists including Joe Pass, Bud Shank, Carmel Jones, Richard Groove Holmes, Harold Land, Joe Maini and a broad cross section of the cream of Los Angeles musicians. Video from those days is scarce, but here are the closing moments from one of Frank Evans’ TV shows. Wilson’s band plays one of his favored forms, a blues waltz, “Blues for Yna Yna.” Wilson solos on trumpet, Teddy Edwards on tenor saxophone, Jack Wilson on piano.

To hear what Wilson has been up to lately—particularly in regard to his remarkable harmonic imagination—I recommend his 2011 album Legacy.

If you, too, did not make it to Detroit over the weekend for the city’s jazz festival, reading about it may be small consolation. Nonetheless, Mark Stryker’s account in The Detroit Free Press conveys his excitement and covers the highlights as he heard and saw them. Stryker is not a sports reporter, but he named a most valuable player.

■MVP Award: The majestic drummer Billy Hart brought his extraordinary ability to both respond to and spontaneously shape a band’s conception to three performances with three different groups. Freedom, discipline, daring, passion, swing, broken rhythm, orchestral textures, interactive sparring, shocking dynamics, astounding creativity and authority. Want to know what jazz is really about? Listen to Billy Hart. (With the Saxophone Summit, David Weiss’ The Cookers, Quest)

(photo by Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

For all of Stryker’s story, click here. Don’t miss the highlighted sidebars and slide shows.

Here is Hart with his quartet at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York earlier this year with a lovely medium-tempo blues in G, title unknown. From left to right in the video: Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner, Ben Street, Billy Hart.

Go here for a recent Rifftides review of the Hart quartet’s new album.

The piece below ran earlier this month. After it was posted for a few days, the videos were removed. No one at Rifftides or the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts has been able to find out why. Several readers have asked what happened and whether we can restore the videos. The answers are: I don’t know and, yes. Let’s hope that the mystery remover doesn’t strike again.
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Originally posted August 3, 2013

In one of my Rifftides posts on last October’s Oregon Coast Jazz Party, I told you a little about the remarkable program in which Bill Mays traced the development of modern jazz piano. Here’s that section from October 12, 2012

Bill Mays’ History of Jazz Piano concert for a morning audience covered pianists from James P. Johnson to Herbie Hancock. Teddy Wilson, Bill Evans and Bud Powell were among the 13 whose styles Mays summoned without surrendering his individuality. Tommy Flanagan and Sonny Clark had to be set aside when time ran short. I had the privilege of providing narration leading into each of Bill’s segments. That put me in the second best seat in the house in the curve of the nine-foot Steinway as Mays poured himself into interpreting some of the pianists who influenced his development. It was a great experience, with a responsive audience, and so much fun that we’re thinking of doing it again sometime, somewhere.

When the program ended, Bill and I were satisfied enough with it that we sought out the house audio crew to see if they had recorded it. They hadn’t. Well, that was the end of that, we said, although as noted at the conclusion of the report, we hoped that we could do it again. We still do. It turns out that the concert hadn’t quite disappeared. Yesterday we discovered that the festival management had a snippet of it videotaped.

But wait, there’s more. The following morning, Bill played a trio set with Portland bassist Tom Wakeling and Washington, DC, drummer Chuck Redd. Here’s some of what I wrote about it:

The Sunday morning wrap session began with Mays updating and expanding the repertoire of his CD Mays at the Movies. He, Wakeling and Redd concentrated on music from films he admires, has written for, or on whose soundtracks he played. The admiration category included the classics “Laura,” “The Very Thought of You” and “Smile.” His own “Cool Pool” was a Miles Davis “All Blues” clone that he wrote for a producer who didn’t want to pay a heavy licensing fee to use the Davis original.

Holly Hofmann, the gifted flutist who serves as the Oregon Coast Jazz Party’s music director, explains that she has only short portions of the festival concerts videotaped for use in promotion and marketing. Gratitude for small favors is in order, but it’s too bad that there aren’t full-length videos for the archives.

Go here for information about the 2013 festival October 4-6.

A week after her death at 95, Marian McPartland is still on my mind. She’ll be there for a long time. In his biography of the pianist published earlier this year, Shall We Play That One Together? Paul de Barros did a splendid job of blending the facets of McPartland’s personality. He contrasts her famous elegance and charm with determination and crudeness never evident on Piano Jazz, the radio program that made her famous. As de Barros tells it in a Seattle Times blog post, getting Marian’s confidence and trust was a long and often frustrating process. Here is an excerpt:

On the radio, Marian is self-deprecating, gracious and genteel, but in person she could be imperious, demanding, highly critical – sometimes even derisive and mean – and certainly not shy about sharing what was on her mind. Her conversational style was combative. If she didn’t have a good answer, she would offer a clever quip instead, or answer questions with questions. She was particularly vague about dates – a biographer’s nightmare – and when I would press her, she would argue, “Does it really matter?” Or if she didn’t know a precise date, she would sometimes just make one up. In published interviews, she had variously said she moved to New York in 1949, 1950 and 1951. I explained that writing a biography without dates was like playing a tune without the chord changes. “It’s the map, Marian, the timeline is the map.” But she honestly didn’t care. “I never knew when I did all these things I would be required to remember them,” she complained sarcastically.

Marian also had the habit of correcting my pronunciation. “It’s Dee-lius,” she jeered, when I first mistakenly called her favorite composer “Dell-ioos,” After two weeks of such browbeating, I was so frustrated I was ready to abandon the project altogether and fly home.

de Barros stayed around. McP came around. The resulting book is one of the best of all jazz biographies. To read Paul’s account of what it took to make it work, go here.

Then come back and listen to McPartland’s 1956 recording of “I Could Write a Book” with Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums.

Sidebar: It was that kind of work by Morello with wire brushes that led Paul Desmond to recommend to Dave Brubeck that he hire the drummer after Joe Dodge left the Brubeck Quartet. Brubeck did, that very year.

Reminder: Ambiance: The Many Facets of Marian McPartland, produced by jazz journalist Ken Dryden, will air on the Chatanooga, Tennesee, station WUTC-FM Thursday, August 29th, starting approximately at 8:20 pm EDT. It will follow the news magazine Round & About. The two-hour program will include music from throughout her career, drawn from a variety of LPs and CDs, along with a few surprises. It will also include excerpts from Ken’s first of several interviews with the pianist, recorded in 1988. The program will be streamed live at www.wutc.org but will not be archived as a podcast.

Wayne Shorter, Without A Net (Blue Note)

About seven minutes into Shorter’s first soprano saxophone solo on the monumental “Pegasus,” someone in the band says, “Oh, my God!” The interjection stands as reaction not only to that track by Shorter’s quartet and the Imani Winds but also to his quartet throughout the album. “Pegasus,” commissioned by the Imani Winds, is the piece de resistance of this collection of performances recorded in concert on a 2011 tour. Weaving together the quartet improvising and the wind ensemble reading his demanding score, Shorter achieves intense energy and a successful synthesis of two genres that is rare enough to be noteworthy. It is the centerpiece of the album, but he and the rhythm section are stunning in the eight tracks without the Imani.

The abiding impression is that the Shorter quartet has found a degree of consistent unity few working bands achieve even occasionally. In their decade or so together, Shorter, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade have reached the blessed state reflected in the title of one of the CD’s tunes, “S.S. Golden Mean.” However, they depart from the classic description of the golden mean as a happy medium, a state of balance. They allow extremes, surprises, explosions of the unexpected. The four seem wide open to anything, eager to capitalize on the next chance one of them takes. The ability to land on their feet is better insurance than a net. “Zero Gravity to the 10th Power” and “(The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects” find Shorter on tenor sax reacting to and developing ideas generated by the rhythm section. In “Orbits,” “Plaza Real,” the old movie song “Flying Down to Rio,” indeed throughout, the collective improvisation frequently creates edge-of-the-seat anticipation that Shorter, Perez, Patitucci and Blade satisfy even after repeated hearings.

On the eve of his 80th birthday, August 25, Shorter has made his mark many times over. This album is not about making a new one, except in the sense that it finds him and his remarkable quartet at a level of togetherness verging on ESP.

Two days following Cedar Walton’s passing, we have lost another splendid pianist, one of the world’s best known and best loved jazz artists. Marian McPartland died in her sleep just before midnight Tuesday in her home on Long Island, New York. A message from family members reports that she passed away, “smiling, knowing that she was surrounded by family and friends.” Ms. McPartland was 95.

She developed from a shy English schoolgirl into a major influence in the music. It is the story of talent, determination and unforced charm overcoming prejudices in jazz against women and, in some quarters in the 1940s, against foreigners having the presumption to play “our” music. For a comprehensive survey of her life and importance, see Peter Keepnews’s McPartland obituary in today’s New York Times. Paul de Barros’s recent McPartland biography is highly recommended. For thoughts about her growth into a substantial jazz player, here is a portion of my notes for her 1982 trio album Personal Choice.

A pleasing and popular jazz artist since her earliest exposure on the New York and Chicago club scenes, year by year she has increased her command of the piano and looked more deeply into her art. McPartland’s piano playing has always been beautiful. Now, it is also lean, tough and full of surprises.

It is no coincidence that during the past decade, her period of most intense artistic development, she has been heavily involved with extracurricular activities. Her National Public Radio program “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz” is into its third season as one of the most successful live jazz series ever presented. It has brought her into close contact with many of her fellow pianists, ranging in style from Eubie Blake to Chick Corea. Her cable TV series, “Women in Jazz,” has been shown all over the country. She has also remained extremely active in music education on the primary, secondary and college levels, conducting workshops and seminars. Despite all these commitments…possibly in part because of them…Marian continues to grow as a player, moving closer and closer to the essence of jazz. It is inconceivable that anyone today could write of her “woman’s touch, as a Down Beat reviewer did, disparagingly, in the early 1970s. The concept does not apply. She has the technique, the forthright inventiveness, the expressiveness of a first-rank jazz pianist. Gender is irrelevant.

Great Day in Harlem photo by Art Kane

“I feel I have more freedom at the keyboard now to experiment with new ideas,” Marian says. “I think I’m getting better, and I want to keep on getting better. It’s rewarding to know there has been some improvement. It’s nice to be in this business because chances to be creative are never-ending. There’s always more than you can do. You can’t say, “well, I’ve done everything; now I’m going to retire, give myself a gold watch, and go to Florida to play Shuffleboard.”

She kept getting better—and bolder. On her show, she once got into a free jazz give-and-take with the iconoclastic pianist Cecil Taylor. “I’ve become a bit more — reckless, maybe,” she said when she was 80. “I’m getting to the point where I can smash down a chord and not know what it’s going to be, and make it work.”

Given her importance, there is surprisingly little on film or videotape of Marian performing. Here, she plays her composition “Afterglow” at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1974.

For a more robust aspect of McP’s playing—in a jam session with Jimmy McPartland, Joe Venuti and others—watch this video from 1975.

In New York, I occasionally encountered Marian on the street or the Times Square shuttle. Once on the train, she sat down next to me with a serious expression and said, “I saw what you wrote.” In Down Beat, I had reviewed one of her albums and complimented her liner notes, with something like, “I wish she’d mind her own business. Do I run around playing the piano?” She stared at me as the subway rattled along. “Oh, oh,” I thought, ‘here it comes.’” She said, “I laughed at that for a good five minutes.”

One night at the Algonquin Hotel, where Alec Wilder lived for years, Marian, Willis Conover, Paul Desmond, my wife and I ringed our chairs around Alec for one of his evenings holding court in the lobby that served as his living room. Marian and Alec adored one another. As always on those occasions, their good feeling set the tone with his good-natured grumpiness and her laughter. I wish that we could do it again.

 

In late summer each year, the Rifftides staff photographer puts a camera in the bike bag and heads out to orchard country to see how the apples are coming along.

It seems there will be a crop.

 

 

 

Some apples are taking on color sooner than others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In six weeks or so, that gorgeous fruit will begin showing up in your neighborhood grocery store.

Do I miss New York (and all those other places)? Well, yes, but there are compensations.

 

Speaking of apples, here’s your bonus:

 

Charlie Parker, alto saxophone
Charlie Byrd, guitar;
Bill Shanahan, piano
Merton Oliver, bass
Don Lamond, drums
Unknown, bongos

Howard Theater, Washington, DC, October 18, 1952

Cedar Walton died this morning at his home in Brooklyn at the age of 79. Family members confirmed his passing but have not announced the cause of death. A pianist admired for his adaptability and thorough musicianship, Walton wrote tunes that became jazz standards, among them “Firm Roots,” “Bolivia,” “Ugetsu,” “Midnight Waltz” and “Something in Common.” My notes for his 2009 CD Voices Deep Within summarize Walton’s career from the time he was a high school music student in Dallas, Texas.

It must have been a remarkable school; his band mates included the budding tenor saxophonists David “Fathead” Newman and James Clay, and trumpeter Bobby Bradford. Bradford told Kirk Silsbee (in the notes for Cedar’s Seasoned Wood, High Note HCD 7185) “—Cedar was way ahead of us—he could already play the bop changes that we were learning. He’d correct us when we weren’t sure of what we were doing.” By the time he got out of Army in 1958, Cedar was ready for advanced work in New York. Before the decade ended, he had played with J.J. Johnson, Gigi Gryce and the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. In the early sixties he became a regular on the recording scene and a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the edition that included Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard. His work with Blakey established him as a pianist and composer of dependability, inventiveness and versatility. He has occupied the top ranks of both categories ever since.

From my notes for Breakthrough, one of his major mid-career albums by a group that he led with tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley:

His playing matured with Blakey, and his composing skills found a ready outlet. The Messengers recorded several of Cedar’s tunes. Walton’s style is rooted squarely in the bop tradition but, as is eloquently evident on this record, he has grown dramatically since the early days when he was essentially a Bud Powell disciple. The Powell base is an inseparable foundation; but at 37, Cedar has built on it one of the most logical and original personal styles of the major pianists influenced by Powell.

For more on Cedar’s career, see a story by Robert Wilonsky in today’s Dallas Morning News. A YouTube search turns up dozens of videos involving Walton, none with better audio and video fidelity—or spirit—than this one. Bob Cranshaw is on bass and Grady Tate on drums with Walton in Japan in 1995.

Detroit is gearing up (they’re good at that in Detroit) for the 2013 edition of its massive free jazz festival over the Labor Day weekend. A central performer at the festival and a major figure in the city’s jazz community is the 45-year-old bassist Rodney Whitaker, internationally known as a player and as an educator of new generations of musicians. He is the head of jazz studies at Michigan State University. In today’s Detroit Free Press, its music editor, Mark Stryker, writes:

Whitaker has imported the Detroit model of tradition, mentorship and community into the university. “Each one, teach one,” Whitaker said, repeating a favorite saying by the late pianist Kenny Cox, one of the many Detroit veterans who guided Whitaker’s jazz education. Like another key mentor, the legendary Detroit trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, Whitaker has older MSU students coaching less experienced peers.

“What we’re really doing is teaching leadership through jazz,” Whitaker said. “Our goal is to raise 1,000 people, who are gonna raise 1,000 people, who are gonna raise 1,000 people who are all going to go out there and change the world. In order to make them better performers, we have to educate the whole person.”

To read all of Stryker’s profile of Whitaker as musician, teacher and family man—and to see a video of the bassist in action, go here. A sidebar linked to the column lists Whitaker’s appearances at the festival. For a look at the festival lineup go here.

Then start packing.

On opposite coasts of the US, Jim Wilke (Washington State) and Bill Kirchner (New Jersey) will present stimulating jazz listening this Sunday. Here’s Wilke’s announcement:

Anat Cohen has been winning both critics and readers national jazz polls for several years and she tours continually, playing major jazz festivals and clubs around the world. The last week of July found her in Port Townsend, WA where she was teaching and performing at Centrum’s annual jazz workshop and festival at Fort Worden State Park. Her performance with Dawn Clement, piano, Chuck Deardorf, bass and Jeff Hamilton, drums was recorded for Jazz Northwest and will air on Sunday, August 18 at 2 PM (PDT) on 88.5 KPLU and simultaneously stream at kplu.org.

Anat Cohen was born in Tel Aviv and received her early musical education and experience playing jazz there. While attending Berklee College of Music in Boston she encountered students from Latin and South American cultures which she absorbed into her own music. That experience was further enhanced by a move to New York after graduation which expanded her musical horizons in a variety of settings.

She started her own record label, Anzic Records and has recorded seven CDs as a leader, the most recent is titled Claroscuro. She also plays soprano and tenor saxophones with authority, but her clarinet playing has drawn the most favorable attention and she choose to concentrate on clarinet in this concert. Included are the Artie Shaw theme song Nightmare, Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz, Jimmy Rowles’ ballad,The Peacocks and a Brazilian choro by Pixinguinha, Um a Zero.

Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for 88.5, KPLU. The program airs Sundays at 2 PM (Pacific) and is available after the broadcast as a streaming podcast at kplu.org

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Here’s Kirchner’s description of the second show in his newly revived participation in Jazz From The Archives:

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).

In the fall of 1967, the Miles Davis Quintet (with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) participated in an all-star tour as part of the Newport Jazz Festival in Europe. Several of the concerts were recorded and/or filmed, but for years they were available only as bootlegs. A couple of years ago, they finally were released legitimately by Sony Records.

We’ll hear performances from several concerts by this Quintet–one of the greatest jazz groups ever–at its peak.

The show will air this Sunday, August 18, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.

NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at http://www.wbgo.org/

It is Bill Evans’ birthday. He was born on August 16, 1929 and died on September 15,1980. Evans influenced pianists in all genres of music. With bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, he changed the concept of the jazz piano trio. From their 1959 album Portrait In Jazz, here is a performance that played an important part in bringing about that change.

A few major record labels survive, but most jazz albums come from independent companies, many of them one-man or one-woman operations. Digital technology makes recording relatively simple and inexpensive for small independent labels. It also makes it easy for musicians to be their own record companies. Some record at home in living rooms or basements. Those with good gear and a modicum of engineering skill can achieve high quality sound. The business of making records has come a long way since the painstaking, labor-intensive process the film in this recent Rifftides piece illustrates. One of the results is that at a time when the audience for jazz is holding at about two percent of the record market, more jazz CDs than ever are being recorded.

Until fairly recently, the non-technological roadblocks to do-it-yourself record businesses were distribution, promotion, advertising and publicity. Internet uploading, the rise of social media and the expanding population of independent publicists have changed that. Indeed, some musicians are their own publicists and distributors by way of their websites, Facebook pages, email lists, the postal department, FedEx and UPS. Getting a record out and calling attention to it is relatively easy. That presents the listener with an embarrassment of riches (to be optimistic about musical quality). The reviewer must face the impossibility of giving thorough hearings to even a small percentage of the CDs that show up on his doorstep, sometimes as many as a half-dozen a day.

All the reviewer—this one, at least—can do is try to listen to as much as possible, write the occasional full-length review and otherwise share impressions of some of what he hears. Here are recommendations, some in brief, of recent and a few not-so-recent arrivals.

Mike Wofford, It’s Personal (Capri)

In this album with the apt title, Wofford’s harmonic and rhythmic approaches to Johnny Carisi’s “Springsville,” make the piece his own. A few seconds into the track, the listener abandons the idea of comparing Wofford’s version with the indelible 1957 Miles Davis-Gil Evans recording. At some points the pianist seems to be floating, as if the piece were a leisurely nocturne rich with underlying chords. And yet, the pulse that powers his performance continues throughout, however subliminally. The unfailing jazz feeling of his playing and his ingenuity with chord voicings are evident everywhere in the dozen tracks of this solo album, a highlight in Wofford’s extensive discography. He imparts his personal stamp to pieces by Jackie McLean, Dizzy Gillespie, Gigi Gryce, the guitarist Larry Koonse, among others.

Wofford gives Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “The Eighth Veil” a reflective reading quite apart from the rhythmic insistence of Ellington’s 1962 big band recording. He includes a medley of two pieces with the same name, “Once in a Lifetime.” The first is the 1960s standard by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The other is by the new wave band Talking Heads. He makes the Talking Heads song a solid jazz vehicle while retaining the rock group’s whimsy. Among Wofford’s original compositions, “Cole Porter” captures something of the drama and elegance of its namesake and his songs. “It’s Personal” opens with melodic foreshadowing and harmonies that may have to do with John Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice,” then it blossoms into a distinctive ballad. “Hines Catch-up” is a medium-tempo F blues dedicated to Earl Hines. It is a knowing appreciation of the father of modern jazz piano, with side trips through a couple of Art Tatum runs. It is also a self-portrait by a pianist capable of paying homage without lapsing into imitation or parody or being anyone but himself. In this track, the album’s good feeling, relaxation and solid values are at their zenith.

Rudresh Mahanthappa, Gamak (ACT)

An alto saxophonist, Mahanthappa melds his American jazz values and Indian cultural heritage—along with a number of other ingredients—into original music that cannot be categorized. The album is dedicated to the proposition that melody rules, and that melody and wild excitement can go hand in hand. To an extent, the music is built around Dave Fiuczynski, a guitarist who can reach instant intensity. But Mahanthappa is the guiding spirit, a powerful soloist and a leader with a vision that Fiuczynski, bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Dan Weiss help him achieve with unity, superb musicianship and riveting energy.

Jeremy Pelt, Water And Earth (High Note)

Pelt applies the warmth and brilliance of his trumpet playing to his original compositions and a piece by bassist Stanley Clarke. The rhythm section features Fender Rhodes piano and electric bass throughout and, occasionally, muffled singing. The album has a jazz fusion aspect that reaches back to the 1970s, with occasional use of heavy drum echo and other electronic sounds. Interesting soloing by Pelt and saxophonist Roxy Cross, who is notable on tenor, usually overcomes the lounge atmosphere. The credits list “Jeremy Pelt: trumpet, effects.” Sometimes, in “Boom Bishop” for instance, the effects win. When his trumpet is unadorned, he wins.

Next time: more brief reviews.

Denny Zeitlin, Both/And (Sunnyside)

One-man bands have come a long way since 1941, when Sidney Bechet recorded “The Sheik of Araby.” Playing clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones, piano, bass and drums, Bechet and the RCA engineers laboriously added an instrument in each of a succession of takes until the band was all present and accounted for on one master 78 rpm disc. Today’s digital electronics simplify the process and expand the possibilities, but one thing has not changed since Bechet’s painstaking feat—the need for virtuosity by the performer and the recording engineer. For the first six tracks in Both/And, Zeitlin fills both roles. He records on acoustic and electric pianos and creates synthesizer sounds that are uncannily like those of brass, reed, string and rhythm instruments and a choir. In the five sections of the kaleidoscopic “Monk-y Business Revisited,” he shares producing and recording credit with electronic music pioneer Patrick Gleeson.

Zeitlin, a psychiatrist, made his first major impact when he was a medical student. As the pianist on Jeremy Steig’s Flute Fever, his playing, in particular his solo on “Oleo,” came in for enthusiastic critical notice. Flute Fever has never been reissued on CD. He followed with four trio albums for Columbia that established him as one of the leading young pianists in jazz.
In the late 1960s and through much of the seventies, Zeitlin changed direction. On his website, he describes the shift:

I withdrew from public performance to research possibilities in electronic music, hire engineers to build sound-altering equipment, modify existing keyboards and synthesizers, build systems and racks, and find kindred musical spirits. What emerged was an evolving set-up that looked like a 747 cockpit of 7+ keyboards and synths, myriad processors and pedals, (and) what seemed like miles of connectors…

Some of Zeitlin’s music from his first electronic period is on Expansion, an album that he recorded and released on his own after record companies turned it down, even as his trio records continued to sell. There is more of his electronic work in the soundtrack he composed for the 1978 remake of the science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His work in the film brought praise from critics including Paulene Kael of The New Yorker, who wrote, “…dazzling score…the music is a large contributor to the jokes and terrors.” Zeitlin’s demanding involvement with the movie drained him of desire to do further motion picture writing and performing. Through the ‘80s, ‘90s and into the new century he has concentrated largely on acoustic piano while maintaining his day gigs; psychiatric practice and university teaching. He has chronicled his work on the Steinway in several recent releases on Sunnyside Records.

In Both/And, Zeitlin returns to the electronic arena with a collection so finely crafted that his means of producing it are considerations secondary to the success of the music as music. A piece called “Meteorology” is a meditation on Weather Report, the group in which Joe Zawinul pioneered the synthesizer in jazz. It opens with Zeitlin’s convincing approximation of Jaco Pastorius’s electric bass. The bass provides the backbone and continuity of the piece. Once the atmosphere is established, the listener’s attention goes to the quality and content of the solos and ensembles. What Zeitlin achieves in integrating the elements could have come only through meticulous labor in the studio, but in “Meteorology” and throughout the CD the music imparts the impression of spontaneity. That is as true of the mysterious “Dawn,” with its intimations of Alan Hovahness or Kryzsztof Penderecki abstraction, as of the “trombone” like a rampaging bull elephant in the jungle of “Tiger, Tiger.”

Zeitlin’s Steinway is prominent in a ballad, “Kathryn’s Song,” interacting with a string orchestra in “Dystopian Uprising” and in “Monk-y Business Revisited.” If only real string sections could achieve the phrasing and swing feeling that Zeitlin gives the “strings” in the “Into The Funk” section of “Monk-y Business.” It’s an orchestra of Harry Lookofskys. As for percussion, if I didn’t know that this project is essentially a one-man operation, I would suspect Zeitlin and Gleeson of editing a live drummer and a trap set into the final mix.

This is a substantial album, fascinating for its musicianship, variety, good humor and the multifaceted talents of Denny Zeitlin

In one of my Rifftides posts on last October’s Oregon Coast Jazz Party, I told you a little about the remarkable program in which Bill Mays traced the development of modern jazz piano. Here’s that section from October 12, 2012

Bill Mays’ History of Jazz Piano concert for a morning audience covered pianists from James P. Johnson to Herbie Hancock. Teddy Wilson, Bill Evans and Bud Powell were among the 13 whose styles Mays summoned without surrendering his individuality. Tommy Flanagan and Sonny Clark had to be set aside when time ran short. I had the privilege of providing narration leading into each of Bill’s segments. That put me in the second best seat in the house in the curve of the nine-foot Steinway as Mays poured himself into interpreting some of the pianists who influenced his development. It was a great experience, with a responsive audience, and so much fun that we’re thinking of doing it again sometime, somewhere.

When the program ended, Bill and I were satisfied enough with it that we sought out the house audio crew to see if they had recorded it. They hadn’t. Well, that was the end of that, we said, although as noted at the conclusion of the report, we hoped that we could do it again. We still do. It turns out that the concert hadn’t quite disappeared. Yesterday we discovered that the festival management had a snippet of it videotaped.

But wait, there’s more. The following morning, Bill played a trio set with Portland bassist Tom Wakeling and Washington, DC, drummer Chuck Redd. Here’s some of what I wrote about it:

The Sunday morning wrap session began with Mays updating and expanding the repertoire of his CD Mays at the Movies. He, Wakeling and Redd concentrated on music from films he admires, has written for, or on whose soundtracks he played. The admiration category included the classics “Laura,” “The Very Thought of You” and “Smile.” His own “Cool Pool” was a Miles Davis “All Blues” clone that he wrote for a producer who didn’t want to pay a heavy licensing fee to use the Davis original.

Holly Hofmann, the gifted flutist who serves as the Oregon Coast Jazz Party’s music director, explains that she has only short portions of the festival concerts videotaped for use in promotion and marketing. Gratitude for small favors is in order, but it’s too bad that there aren’t full-length videos for the archives.

Go here for information about the 2013 festival October 4-6.

As reported in this Rifftides coverage last fall, a concert by the Clayton Brothers is likely to become a party. John and Jeff Clayton and their band partied again at the recent Jazz Port Townsend festival on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Jim Wilke, a fine recording engineer as well as an award-winning broadcaster, captured the Claytons and will feature their performance on his Jazz Northwest program this Sunday. Here is Jim Levitt’s photograph of the band and a guest at the concert.

And here is Mr. Wilke’s announcement:

A concert by the Clayton Brothers quintet and special guest Stefon Harris is the first of a seven concert series from Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend which will air on Jazz Northwest, Sunday August 4 at 2 PM PDT on 88.5 KPLU.

Co-led by brothers John Clayton (bass) and Jeff Clayton (alto sax and flute), the group also includes John’s son Gerald on piano, Terell Stafford on trumpet, and Obed Calvaire, drums.  John Clayton is also Artistic Director of Jazz Port Townsend and the Jazz Camp which leads up to the weekend festival, now in its 40th year.  Special guest on this concert is the vibraphonist Stefon Harris, who is one of the brightest stars on the insrument.  He has seven CDs as a leader and has been a popular sideman in many situations including the Clayton Brothers.

Concerts from Jazz Port Townsend will air on alternate weeks during coming months, with the Anat Cohen Quartet next on August 18.  Also in the series are concerts by Bria Skonberg, René Marie and Sachal Vasandani, the Centrum All-Star Band directed by Clarence Acox in a Salute to Quincy Jones, Cyrille Aimée and Diego Figueredo, and The Anthony Wilson Nonet.

Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for 88.5 KPLU.  The program airs Sundays at 2 PM Pacific, and is available as a podcast at kplu.org after the broadcast.  Special thanks to Rick Chinn and Neville Pearsall for assistance with recording at Jazz Port Townsend.

Oh, what the heck, let’s add the Clayton Brothers quintet at work. The video is from The Pittsburgh Jazzlive festival in June, 2012. It provides a sample of this intergenerational band’s togetherness and—at the end&#151of young Obed Calvaire’s drumming energy.

Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions (Mosaic)

In a couple of record dates when Woody Shaw was 21 and in a dozen years through the 1970s and ‘80s, Muse Records captured some of the trumpeter’s most innovative and inspired work. When Shaw emerged, it was clear that Freddie Hubbard had influenced the younger man but, as he was to demonstrate, the model Shaw reflected most profoundly was not a trumpeter but a saxophonist, John Coltrane. The characterization of Shaw as a Hubbard clone persists in some quarters to this day, but at his most brilliant he was one of the great individualists of his generation of jazz artists. His intelligence, creative drive and technical mastery are plain to hear in his solos on the five quintet pieces he recorded with tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson in late 1965. “Cassandranite” and “Three Muses” from those sessions are early indicators of his gift for composition as well as playing.

By 1974, Shaw had processed Coltrane’s innovations so that when he recorded “The Moontrane,” a piece he wrote in his teens, he was indicating the way out of what many young musicians saw as a creative dead zone in which jazz was languishing in the early ’70s. Shaw helped demonstrate that it was possible to admire Coltrane, even adore him as a guru, without apeing his every mannerism. In pieces such as “The Moontrane” “Zoltan” and “Katrina Ballerina,” Joe Bonner’s “Love Dance” and Larry Young’s “Obsequious,” Shaw reached a level of expressiveness, headlong linear development and freedom from post-bop conventions that was not only ahead of his time; this music from three and four decades ago is ahead of much of the rote, formulaic jazz of our time. The Mosaic box set makes it clear to what an extent Shaw was at once a liberator of the music and a preserver of tradition.

His respect for the mainstream is manifest in the set’s final two CDs containing 14 standards, among them “The Touch Of Your Lips,” “There Is No Greater Love,” “It Might As Well Be Spring” and “All The Way,” which concludes with a riveting Shaw cadenza on flugelhorn. He also plays, faster than fast, on trumpet “The Woody Woodpecker Song,” often quoted in solos but rarely, if ever before, given recognition as a full-fledged vehicle for improvisation. Shaw’s and pianist Kenny Barron’s solos elevate the song’s stature so that the 1948 novelty almost seems to belong with “Imagination,” “If I Were A Bell,” “Dat Dere” and “Stormy Weather.” In several of the sessions, markedly in the standards albums, Shaw’s and trombonist Steve Turre’s compatibility is essential to the music’s feeling of cohesiveness—and its humor.

The five pieces Shaw recorded with his seven-piece band at the 1976 Berlin Jazz Festival—notably the epic “Hello to the Wind”—are enduring examples of the possibilities for harmonic texture in medium-sized jazz groups. In terms of sheer improvisational exuberance, the exchanges on the Berlin version of “Obsequious” between Shaw and trombonist Slide Hampton and those between saxophonists Rene McLean and Frank Foster rank with the most exhilarating chases ever captured on record.

His contemporaries and a number of perceptive older musicians understood Shaw’s importance and welcomed the opportunity to work with him. His teaming with Dexter Gordon, commemorated on Gordon’s Columbia albums, enhanced the saxophonist’s triumphant return to the United States after decades in Europe. The list of Shaw’s collaborators in this seven-CD set is a cross-section of leading players that includes, as mentioned, Henderson, Foster, McLean, Hampton, Turre, Barron and Young. Others are Herbie Hancock, Frank Strozier, Ron Carter, Buster Williams, Ray Drummond, Victor Lewis, Peter Leitch, Kenny Garrett, Neil Swainson, Cedar Walton, Louis Hayes, Steve Turre and the avant gardists Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. As usual with Mosaic sets, production is first rate, with thorough discographical information, plenty of photographs of Shaw and several of his sidemen and interesting session-by-session notes by his son, Woody Shaw III. Audio remastering by Malcolm Addey is excellent.

Shortly before his death, deteriorating vision, addiction, his uneven lifestyle and a subway accident in which he lost an arm brought an end to Shaw’s career. Throughout the Mosaic set, his intellectual and physical energy, harmonic innovation and mastery of melody are reminders of what we lost when he died at the age of 44 in 1989, two years after the last of these Muse sessions.