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Norma Winstone, Descansado: Songs For Films (ECM)

In an album striking for its quietness and its daring, British vocalist Norma Winstone and her augmented trio interpret music from motion pictures. The augmentation is important; Mario Brunello’s cello and Helge Klaus Norbakken’s percussion add breadth and depth to arrangements that buoy Ms. Winstone’s flawless singing and the lyrics that she wrote for the recording. Clarinetist and saxophonist Klaus Gesing and pianist-arranger Glauco Venier continue their essential roles in the trio.

The music comes from films of Vitorio De Sica, Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini, among other directors. The earliest is Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V. Composers include Michel Legrand, Nino Rota, William Walton and Bernard Hermann. Six of the pieces have lyrics by Ms. Winstone. An example of her understanding of a film’s mood—for music from Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), she wrote a stanza capturing the film’s melancholy:

I remember laughter on the air
Footsteps running through the empty square
Mem’ries of the past are all around
On the ancient streets where ghosts are found

The delicacy required for the aural relationships between Ms. Winstone’s voice and the instruments is impeccably observed by ECM engneer Stefano Almerio and producer Manfred Eicher. In its depth and balance, the sound quality is virtually a sixth member of the ensemble.

And Ms. Winstone is perfect for the material. Or is it the other way around?

Coming soon: We check in on other recent ECM releases.

The remarkable Woody Herman big band of the mid-1940s never made a studio recording of the roaring blues called “Red Top.” As the swing era was losing ground to bebop, the Herman First Herd blended the best of both genres. Today’s edition of Mosaic Records’ Gazette includes “Red Top” from a 1945 Herman radio broadcast, along with an extensive history of the Herman band by the swing era scholar Michael Zirpolo. Soloists include pianist Ralph Burns, tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips, trombonist Bill Harris and the arsonist trumpeter Pete Candoli. To hear that rare performance and read Zirpolo’s essay, click here.

Mosaic evidently long ago sold out its seven-CD box set of the Herman band’s 1945-1947 Columbia recordings. It has become a collector’s item. Alert web browsers may be able to track it down on some sites; this one, for instance. Good luck. It’s a treasure.

Wesla Whitfield, a singer of uncommon talent, taste, musicianship and courage, died yesterday in St. Helena, California. Her husband and accompanist of more than three decades, the pianist Mike Greensill, announced her passing. She had been under treatment for bladder cancer and was recently in hospice care but died at home. She was 70. I once wrote,

Whitfield is often billed as a cabaret singer…but with her time sense, phrasing and inflection, the fuzzy border between cabaret and jazz disappears.

Here, in November of 2015, she sings two songs by Harry Warren at a memorial service for her record producer and friend Orrin Keepnews. Her accompanists are Mike Greensill, bassist John Wiitala, drummer Lorca Hart and the Kronos String Quartet.

Over the years, Ms. Whitfield and Mr. Greensill have been the subjects of several Rifftides posts. To read some of them, go here.

For a thorough review of Wesla Whitfield’s life, including the incident that put her in a wheelchair, and for an assessment of her talent, see Daniel Slotkin’s article in today’s New York Times.

In the 1950s when UCLA football coach Red Sanders (pictured left) said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he could not have known that his sports philosophy would be adapted to virtually every human endeavor. Being number one is the overriding aim not only in sports, but also in politics and international relations—as we keep hearing from the White House—and in business and the arts. Hence, there is consternation at this week’s news trumpeted in Billboard magazine that sales of CDs are so far down that the Best Buy chain will stop carrying them and Target stores may not be far behind. At the root of the change, of course, is the digital revolution; music downloaded from the Internet seems to be replacing music embedded in spinning discs.

Reports about the decline in CD sales invariably include statistics showing that jazz recordings sell at more or less the same numbers as those of classical music—perhaps implying that there is reason to regret that Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Mozart and Stravinsky reach audiences of similar size. Serious listeners will wish jazz and classical CD companies and their distributors the best, regardless of how the music is delivered, but as CDs go the way of LPs it is not hard to feel pangs of regret. Oh, wait a minute—vinyl is making a modest comeback, however unlikely it is to replace CDs. Or downloads.

Speaking of vinyl, I’ll mention a couple of fairly recent LP reissues that have kept the Rifftides turntable busy:

Joe Henderson’s The Elements (1974) is nicely remastered on the Milestone label. It contains the tenor saxophonist’s compositions “Fire,” “Air,” “Water” and “Earth” and has a distinguished cast that includes pianist Alice Coltrane, bassist Charlie Haden, violinist Michael White, percussionist Kenneth Nash and, on two tracks, drummer Ndugu Leon Chancler, who died last weekend at age 65. One of the most adventurous albums in Henderson’s discography, it finds him and his colleagues indulging mid-1970s jazz tendencies toward eastern spiritualism and mysticism. Among other attractions, Haden has a remarkable solo, accompanied by Nash’s special acoustic effects, on “Earth.” The track also contains vocal interjections by Henderson and his tenor mingling with White’s violin. The album is engrossing and not typical of Henderson’s music during this, or any other, period.

 

Wayne Horvitz, 55: Music In Dance And Concrete (Other Room Music)

In 2014 Horvitz, the restlessly exploratory composer, went underground for this experience in sound. With him in the caverns and huge cistern of Fort Warden, a former military base near Seattle, were a choreographer, dancers, audio engineers, and musicians playing string, reed and brass instruments. Horvitz explains in his articulate notes that he wrote 55 pieces of music and spent several days recording the musicians’ improvisations, taking advantage of the natural reverberations of the caverns and cistern. Extensive post-production followed.

The resulting music is haunting, unpredictable. Horvitz observes, “The various ambiences themselves created such a seductive palette that it was easy to stay inspired.” He added later that there was, “– a multitude of ideas happening simultaneously, so there’s more to discover every time you listen to it.”

This music can seduce you.

Vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake has instructed hundreds of aspiring jazz musicians in the techniques and mysteries of improvisation. Among his early students was Ted Nash (pictured), who as a young man left Los Angeles, became a stalwart of New York’s jazz community, and wins Grammys. Nash has long been a featured soloist in the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra. Mr. Shoemake sent the following message today:

 

A former student of mine sent me this video of Ted Nash performing at Lincoln Center a week or so ago. I was floored by the beauty of his performance. To know that I got him started from scratch when he was 14 and to hear him now is a huge thrill and high for me.

Among the many Canadian musicians attracting the attention of listeners outside Canada is the pianist and singer Laila Biali. She was born in Vancouver, B.C., in 1980 and trained in classical piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Much of her popularity stems from recordings and videos covering hits by pop performers including Coldplay, David Bowie and Neil Young, but it’s her piano playing and arranging that have made impressions among jazz audiences. Here, Ms. Biali and her frequent bassist George Koller perform the traditional song “Down In The River To Pray.” Although research has failed to trace the piece to an individual, it is frequently attributed to an anonymous African-American slave. Ms. Biali’s brief piano solo suggests that she and the late Ray Bryant may have had common influences.

The music of trumpeter, composer and resolute individualist Wadada Leo Smith is absorbing. It often has a demanding density even when he is the only player—as he is in one of these albums. It can bring rewards to the listener who accepts Smith’s free jazz heritage and listens to him with open ears and open mind. As in his recent tribute to America’s national parks, his paean to Miles Davis, duets with pianist Vijay Iyer and a succession of other albums over the years, Smith has a vision that embraces Lennie Tristano, Ornette Coleman, Chicago’s AACM movement and John Coltrane, among other artists who as early as the late 1950s began liberating their work from standard jazz approaches.

In Smith’s album of music by and about Thelonious Monk he is alone with his trumpet. That creates a conceptual challenge for the player of an instrument incapable of harmonic accompaniment. He compensates by employing passing tones to fill in or imply harmonies. The canny Smith’s familiarity with chord substitutions and his formidable trumpet technique make for thrills and occasional amusement, as when he leaps high above the staff to nail precisely the only note that would work at a certain point in his variations on “Ruby, My Dear.” As in most of his albums, Smith’s nicely crafted liner essay answers questions about his titles. He explains that “Monk And His Five Point Ring At The Five Spot Café,” for instance, was inspired by a clip from a documentary about Monk. The occasion that titled “Monk and Bud Powell at Shea Stadium” may never have happened in real life, but in a dream that Smith remembers. Nothing in his playing directly evokes either pianist. Some titles need no explanation; it tends to be general knowledge among Monk followers that “Crepuscle With Nellie” was for his wife. Smith gives the melody a loving late-evening interpretation ending on a lingering high B-flat. When Smith uses his Harmon mute, as he does on “Adagio: Monk, the Composer in Sepia,” his inner Miles Davis emerges. The influence is pronounced. Earlier in the album, essentially the same piece with an altered title is without the mute. Smith also caresses “’Round Midnight” on open horn, playing it slowly. The mood is not unlike those that Davis often created on ballads. When Smith plays the occasional note with cracked edges, it’s natural to wonder who he was thinking of.

There is little question about that in Smith’s Najwa. The album features the electric bass and production skills of Bill Laswell, a veteran of the Downtown movement in New York City in the 1970s. Like Smith, Laswell is partial to the electronic Miles Davis. Their fondness for that idiom helps determine Najwa’s atmosphere. Smith has a long history with three of the guitarists here, Michael Gregory Jackson, Brandon Ross and Henry Kaiser. He has a newer, family, relationship with the fourth guitarist, Lamar Smith, his grandson, who has performed with him since 2009, been a member of Wadada Leo’s Organic Ensemble and Silver Orchestra and was on the Yo Miles! album. From the first track, evocative of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, much of the album’s power rides on Laswell’s bass lines, often in harness with the drumming of Pheeroan akLaff, a Detroit native with a forty-year history in the free jazz sphere. In its titles as well as its music, Najwa constitutes tributes to Coleman, John Coltrane, the late drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and Billie Holiday. The ten-minute Holiday track is entitled, “The Empress, Lady Day: In a Rainbow Garden, with Yellow-Gold Hot Springs, Surrounded by Exotic Plants and Flowers.” The other titles, in Smith’s poetic way with words, are nearly as long. Throughout, Smith’s playing is infectious even in his muted work in the slow title tune. By far the shortest piece in the album, its mystery and languor and the melancholy of Smith’s muted solo keep me going back to it.

Maurice Peress, a conductor who served as a link between jazz and classical music, died over the weekend at his home in New York. He was 87. Peress collaborated with Duke Ellington in preparing the composer’s 1943 “Black, Brown And Beige” for performance by a symphony orchestra. He also worked closely with New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein in adapting Bernstein’s “Mass” and works by Charles Ives for symphony performance. When he was conductor of the Kansas City Philharmonic, a performance by Ellington’s band deeply affected Peress. In his 2004 book, Dvorak To Duke Ellington, he wrote:

I was fired up, wondering how a symphony conductor like myself could take part in this important music, music that spoke to me as profoundly as any other, music that reached out and embraced everyone.

Peress found effective ways to adapt Ellington for symphonic presentation. Here, he conducts the American Composers Orchestra in four of the sections of Ellington’s “Black, Brown And Beige,” first played by the Ellington Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1943.