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A few days into his 79th year, tenor saxophonist Hadley Caliman is thriving in the Pacific Northwest, starring in the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra and leading his own group. As a high school youngster, Haliman was a part of the yeasty Los Angeles jazz community of the late 1940s and early ’50s. After college, he went on to record extensively and work with musicians as varied as Gerald Wilson, Don Ellis, Freddie Hubbard, Santana and The Grateful Dead. Jim Wilke recorded Caliman in a recent Seattle Art Museum concert and will present it on his Jazz Northwest program this Sunday, January 24 at 1 pm PST, 4 pm EST. To hear it in the Seattle area, dial up KPLU-FM at 88.5. On the internet, go to KPLU’s web site.
Trumpeter Thomas Marriott (pictured with Caliman) is in the quintet with pianist Eric Verlinde, bassist Chuck Kistler and drummer John Bishop.
Here is video of Caliman a couple of years ago playing in the atrium of Seattle’s City Hall with some of the other major jazz artists who live in that city. Julian Priester is the trombonist, with Bob Hammer, piano; Buddy Catlett, bass; and Clarence Acox, drums. The sound quality is, well, like something you’d hear in an atrium, but it’s an opportunity to listen to five remarkable players in a remote corner of the United States with a rich fund of jazz talent.

Why consider in the same piece albums by pianists as unalike as Matthew Shipp and Greg Reitan? Because in different ways the ghost of Bud Powell informs their music; because pairing them may lead partisans of one to listen to the other and find unexpected rewards; because the profound dissimilarity between the iconoclast Shipp and the modern traditionalist Reitan typifies the wide variety of satisfactions to be found in jazz; and because they are more or less simultaneously releasing new CDs.
Matthew Shipp, 4D (Thirsty Ear).
Shipp’s initial inspiration was Bud Powell, who to a great extent is the underpinning of his music. The unfettered approach of the formidable technician and free adventurer Cecil Taylor is a potent strain in Shipp’s work, but no matter how far out he goes, Shipp’s sense of chord and line movement puts him closer to Powell than Taylor ever was. That is evident throughout the solo album 4D, nowhere more emphatically than in the roiling forward movement and occasional bebop phraseology of “Equilibrium,” which also has hints of Thelonious Monk and Earl Hines. In its opening bars, “Teleportation” bows even lower in Powell’s direction.
Throughout the album, Shipp glimpses other presences; John Coltrane in “Dark Matter” and “Stairs,” Taylor in “Jazz Paradox,” Ellington in “Prelude to a Kiss.” But to dwell on evidence of his influences is to ignore Shipp’s originality, which is bolstered by redoubtable technique. He sometimes holds his keyboard prowess in reserve, but when he unleashes it, as he does in a joyful “What is This Thing Called Love,” it can be dazzling. In addition to the two standards named above and his compositions (or spontaneous creations; it’s difficult to be certain), Shipp applies his daring, ferocity and wit to “Autumn Leaves,” “Greensleeves,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Frere Jacques.” “Frere Jacques?” Yes. Shipp proves that it is possible to operate out there on the edge without losing sight of the fundamentals.
Greg Reitan, Antibes (Sunnyside).
Reitan’s inner Bud Powell filters through Bill Evans and Denny Zeitlin. If there is direct Powell influence, it is more in his adaptation of harmonic concepts than in a reflection of Powell’s manic energy. His keyboard touch and chord voicings are firmly in the Evans school. He shares with Evans, Zeitlin and–consciously or unconsciously–with Keith Jarret, the floating time feeling that comes from rhythmic placement relating chords to individual notes. His interpretations of Evans’s “Re: Person I Knew” and Zeitlin’s “Time Remembers One Time Once” are notable in that regard. The trait also manifests itself in “For Heaven’s Sake,” the exquisitely understated “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and pieces by Jarrett and Wayne Shorter. Bassist Jack Daro and drummer Dean Koba are effective in support.
The tracks with Reitan’s own writing are the ones I keep going back to in Antibes. He told Orrin Keepnews, who wrote the admiring liner notes, that when he was preparing the album he had been listening to Glenn Gould play J.S. Bach. The title tune, the unaccompanied “September” and “Salinas” are direct reflections of that experience. Reitan so skillfully conceived them with Bachian rhythmic and harmonic principles and plays them with such precision and dynamic touch that one might almost be willing accept that Gould had come back as a jazz artist. Reitan’s Some Other Time was an impressive debut album last year. Antibes shows impressive growth and even greater potential.

Once again, Bill Crow’s The Band Room column in the New York musicians union Local 802 newspaper, Allegro, is packed with anecdotes. Here are two.

Outgoing (Local 802) President Mary Landolfi told me this one: Her husband Pat and another tuba player, Lew Waldeck, had arranged to meet at the Carnegie Tavern after a benefit at Carnegie Hall. The major attraction at the benefit was Frank Sinatra, and when Lew came into the Tavern afterward, he was all agog. “Pat,” he said excitedly, “I just met Frank Sinatra, and he spoke to me!” “What did he say?” asked Pat. “He was coming down the stairs just as I was going up, and he said, ‘Get the f*** out of my way!'”

Woody Herman had profound distaste for the fiscal hassles and burdens that made his life miserable in his final years. This story from Bill’s column perfectly captures Woody’s feelings about the business aspects of his profession.

John Altman once had Al Cohn as a houseguest, and Al took John to meet Woody Herman. Al introduced him, saying, “John has a big band.” Woody grabbed John’s outstretched hand, looked earnestly into his eyes, and asked, “Why?”

To read all of Bill’s column, go here.
San Francisco pianist Roberta Mandel sent this excerpt from an interview with drummer Shelly Manne. The story has been around for a long time. I haven’t been able to track down the source of the interview, but anyone who has dealt with ignoramus producers will hear the ring of truth.

Interviewer:
Have you ever gone into the studio and had someone say, “I want you to sound like the guy who did the drums on … ?”
Shelly Manne:
I did a date with Jimmy Bowen, the song was “Fever.” I had never worked with Jim, but I had made the original record of “Fever” with Peggy Lee. It actually said on my part, “play like Shelly Manne.” So I played it just like I played it originally. The producer stormed out of the control room, walked over to me and said “Can’t you read English? It says “play like Shelly Manne.”
When I told him I was Shelly Manne, he turned around and went back into the booth. I think he’s selling cars now.

James Moody is in Detroit this week. Mark Stryker, the music critic of The Detroit Free Press, heralded the event with a column that begins:

James Moody is my hero, and he should be yours. At 84, the irrepressible saxophonist and flutist remains a ferociously creative musician, playing with passion, energy and a sense of wonder at the endless possibilities of music.

Stryker provides a sketch of Moody’s career, then a section that includes this exchange:

Q: Do you practice every day?
A: I try to. If I don’t, I get a little cranky.

A sidebar to the column describes a few recommended Moody albums. To read the whole thing, go here.
Mark Stryker sent a couple of Moody anecdotes as Rifftides supplements to his column.

I heard two stories in recent days that encapsulate Moody’s lifelong approach to learning and evolving as a musician. Dave Liebman told me that one of his early tours with Elvin Jones was part of package with a Giants of Jazz group that included Moody. Moody comes to the back of the bus to ask Liebman and fellow saxophonist Steve Grossman to write out some stuff for him. At one point, Illinois Jacquet turns around and shouts something like, “They ain’t into nuthin'” — at which point Moody says to them, “Don’t listen to moldy figs.”
Then James Carter told me he was on a tour once with Moody and every day it was, “You show me something on the horn and I’ll show you something.” Those two stories occurred some 30 years apart.

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Stryker.
For a sample of Moody’s energy, sound and harmonic inventiveness, here is a performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ow” at a Swiss festival in 1985, when Moody was a mere 60 years old. The composer is on trumpet. The bassist is Ray Brown, who was on Gillespie’s 1940s big band with Moody. Gene Harris is the pianist, Grady Tate the drummer.

Wednesday night, the 2010 NEA Jazz Master awards went to pianists Kenny Barron, Cedar Walton and Muhal Richard Abrams; arranger, composer and band leader Bill Holman; saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef; vibrahaphonist Bobby Hutcherson; singer Annie Ross (pictured at the ceremony); and record producer George Avakian. They received their medals and checks in a National Endowment For The Arts ceremony at Lincoln Center. To read accounts of the event by Nate Chinen of The New York Times and my artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel, click on their names in this sentence.
Congratulations to all of the recipients.

Seamus Blake, Bellwether (Criss Cross). Since 1993, when Seamus Blake was 22, Gerry Teekens of Criss Cross Records has been traveling from Holland to New York to record the gifted Canadian tenor saxophonist. Teekens was one of the first recording executives to document Blake’s work, and he has been doing it ever since. Bellwether is Blake’s sixth Criss Cross album as a leader. He has been a sideman on 16 others. That is hardly overexposure for a musician of his inventiveness. Blake’s technique makes him one of the fastest tenors since Johnny Griffin. His speed can be dazzling, but he employs it in the service of the stories he tells in his solos, not merely for display. Often, he spins out his inventions in long, lyrical lines, as in “A Beleza Que Vem” and “The Song That Lives Inside,” two of his five compositions on the CD. The remaining tracks are John Scofield’s “Dance Me Home” and the third movement of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. Blake included the second movement of the quartet on his previous recording. The liner notes quote him as saying that he treats the Debussy movement as if it is a tune, “and we create a solo section out of some of the chords and loop that area. I guess you could say we sort of ‘jazzify’ it.” Yes, you could say that. Blake’s quintet includes his longtime collaborator pianist David Kikoski, guitarist Lage Lund, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Bill Stewart. Blake often works in Stewart’s band. Whether it is the result of intensive rehearsal or of sympathetic listening among close colleagues, this band has a sense of contrast that is welcome in an age when many jazz groups operate on one dynamic level.
Kenny Dorham, The Flamboyan, Queens, NY, 1963 (Uptown). This broadcast recording is a treasure unearthed after 47 years. Alan Grant, who hosted the broadcast from an obscure club in an outer borough of New York City, preserved the tape of the program. It documents the early stage of the partnership between Dorham, one of the great trumpet soloists of the bebop and post-bop eras, and the young tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. Among the herd of Coltrane clones, Henderson was beginning in the early 60s to attract attention as an individual voice. He went on to be recognized as a modern master of the instrument. The pair made two Blue Note albums together under Dorham’s leadership, three under Henderson’s and one under Andrew Hill’s. This unexpected and welcome preview of their symbiosis deserves a place alongside the Blue Notes.
Dorham’s solo on “Dorian” includes a quote from “I Get The Neck of the Chicken,” an unlikely insertion into a modal piece and typical of his subtle wit. The lyricism of his work on “I Can’t Get Started,” “Summertime” and an early version of his composition “Una Mas” is based in the warmth of his sound and the depth of his unique exploitation of chords. It is a reminder of why nearly half a century later Dorham is an influence on the harmonic thinking of young players. Henderson, fully formed by 1963, solos with daring, passion and tonal qualities that make him immediately recognizable. The rhythm section of pianist Ronnie Matthews, bassist Steve Davis and drummer J.C. Moses is solid and effective despite Matthews having to accommodate to a horrid piano. The CD presents the club performance intact as a broadcast. Grant’s announcements are on tracks that can be programmed out by those who don’t want to hear them on repeated listenings, but they are reminders that there was a time when little clubs presented major players and radio stations did live remotes.
Sam Sadigursky, words project iii miniatures (New Amsterdam). As we pointed out in a Rifftides posting two years ago today, jazz and poetry never really became a movement. Over the past 90 years or so, the hybrid form has had a few peak periods and some embarrassing lows. On the strength of Sam Sadigursky’s work, we may be at one of the peaks. This is Sadigursky’s third CD of poetry set to music or, to be more accurate, poetry integrated with music. His voice, guitar and reeds are in play, along with the voice, trumpet and keyboards of Michael Leonhart. They also use a collection of miscellaneous instruments including Sadigursky’s glockenspiel and Leonhart’s pump organ and waterphone.
Sadigursky employs several womens’ voices to read poetry by Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Maxim Gorky, Kenneth Patchen, contemporary poets David Ignatow, Maureen N. McLane, Sadi Ranson-Polizzetti and others. The poems are rightly described as miniatures because of their length, not their ideas. This is a far cry from a band wailing a blues as a poet reads. There seems to be little improvisation except in the readers’ timing, phrasing and inflections. Yet, the work generally has the feeling of jazz spontaneity. Ignatow’s brief “Content” becomes a wordscape of intersecting lines. Gorky’s “O Muzyke Tostykh” is his late 1920s screed against the middle class infatuation with jazz, which he called the music of degenerates. Sadigursky sets it to a background voiced in minor for bass clarinets, flute, trumpet, glockenspiel and percussion. Through repetition, the four lines of Williams’s “El Hombre” become a mantra riding on the insistence of light Latin rhythm. And so it goes, each poem treated differently, each rewarding the listener’s attention and effort.
BRIEFLY
John Stowell, Anson Wright, The Sky At Our Feet. Anson Wright, Tim Gilson, Ukiah’s Lullaby (Open Path). All of the poetry on The Sky At Our Feet is by Wright. It evokes the beauty and mystery of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in the American desert Southwest. John Stowell reads the poems and accompanies himself on guitar, in some cases overdubbing instruments so that the starkly etched imagery of Wright’s words stands out against the ripples and shimmers of Stowell’s music and what Wright’s web site calls “light electronic scores.” Those augmentations don’t detract from Stowell’s rich backgrounds. A sensitive and resourceful guitarist turns out to be a fine speaker of poetry.
Wright is a guitarist as well as a poet. In that role, he devotes Ukiah’s Lullaby to duets with bassist Gilson. Six of the tunes are his, four Gilson’s. Wright’s “Orion” has the flavor of the kind of modal structures Miles Davis pioneered with “Milestones” and “So What.” They enhance harmonic interest through the spareness of Wright’s strategic chords and melody lines and Gilson’s tuning of his bass in fifths a la the late Red Mitchell. Gilson’s ballad “Sometimes There Are No Words” is beautifully bowed by the bassist.
Mike Longo Trio, Sting Like A Bee (CAP). The remarkable, and remarkably unheralded, pianist’s new CD is a sequel to his –what else?– Float Like A Butterfly of 2007. The Oscar Peterson protégé and Dizzy Gillespie rhythm section stalwart stings as effectively as he floats, opening with Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” and closing unaccompanied with a righteously two-fisted take on Gillespie’s “Kush.” Along the way, Longo, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Lewis Nash explore pieces by Clifford Brown, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein and Cole Porter. They combine delicacy and strength in a compelling treatment of Clare Fisher’s “Morning” and radiate Charlie Parker’s bop spirit in Longo’s “Bird Seed,” which could profitably have gone on much longer. Riches are unlikely for jazz musicians, but Longo surely deserves a bigger portion of fame.

If you are puzzling over the course jazz is taking in the second decade of the new century, this would be a good weekend to be in New York at the Winter Jazzfest. The event is packed with young artists making waves that excite fans their ages and younger, and frustrate many older listeners who have rigid convictions about what constitutes jazz. There is a wide range of musicians and styles, but the prevailing direction is forward, not back. It is an intriguing festival that has Jenny Scheinman, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Jason Moran and Linda Oh under the same umbrella. The festival takes place in several Greenwich Village clubs. Nate Chinen’s piece in The New York Times summarizes what listeners can expect. Here is one of his descriptions:

Ms. Scheinman, a violinist, and Mr. Moran, a pianist, both favor a direct but slightly warped sense of melody, balancing the rustic and the urbane. Their duo rapport should be a genuine conversation.

To read the whole article, go here. To help you get in the mood for some of what you might encounter if you attend, this video has Ms. Scheinman with bassist Ben Allison’s band at the Jazz Standard last fall. Allison is also on the festival this weekend. Shane Endsley is the trumpeter, Steve Cardenas the guitarist, Rudy Royston the drummer.

A memorial service for Stacy Rowles is set for Sunday, January 10, in the auditorium of the Musicians Union local in Hollywood, California. The growing list of more than fifty musicians who will perform in tribute includes Pete Christlieb, Joe LaBarbera, Charlie and Sandi Shoemake, Gary Foster and Mike Melvoin. The trumpeter and singer died in late October of injuries from an automobile accident. She was the daughter of pianist Jimmy Rowles.
The affair will start at 11:00 a.m. and run into the evening. From the organizers’ invitation:

Please be our guest, we’ll be serving tri-tip and chicken with beer, wine and softer things at the bar. If you make a dish you are proud of, you are welcome to bring a taste for the table. One of the rules of the house when Stacy entertained was ‘nobody leaves hungry’, and we never did!

Rifftides reader Ty Newcomb sent a link to video of the Dutch singer Fay Claassen doing Gerry Mulligan’s “Line for Lyons.” After enjoying it, I noticed that YouTube has another version of the piece by The Dave Brubeck Quintet. What to do? Why, show you both, of course.
First, we see and hear the composer with Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jack Six and Alan Dawson at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1972. The director goes berserk with reverse zooms out of the stage lights, but a little dizziness is a small price to pay for a fine performance. Brubeck enjoys the work of his compadres and joins them in a round (so to speak) of counterpoint. Mulligan, sporting his old-man-of-the-mountains look that year, wrote and recorded the tune in the key of G 20 years before, but Desmond preferred it in B-flat and that’s where they play it here.

If you’re keeping track, Fay Claassen also chooses B-flat. She plays Chet Baker to Jan Menu’s Mulligan in an arrangement that thrives on tempo changes. Hein van de Geyn is the bassist. John Engels is on drums.

Among her other accomplishments, Ms. Claasen is a Chet Baker specialist. This double CD is devoted to her interpretations of his trumpet solos and his vocals.

On his JazzWax blog, Marc Myers begins a series about pianist Dick Hyman. What a good idea. The first installment of the interview adds a video clip of Hyman and Billy Taylor doing a two-piano duet on “Hot House.” If you thought Hyman played only Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, read Marc’s interview, then watch that clip.

Gary Peacock and Marc Copland, Insight. Marc Copland, Alone (Pirouet). Copland’s previous explorations on the fine German label Pirouet were four trio CDs and one by a quartet. In these new ones, he pares down personnel but not his signature keyboard touch, melodic inventiveness or harmonic astringency. Peacock, the brilliant bassist, gets top billing in the duo album, but he and Copland are full partners. Laced with chance-taking adventure, their interaction nonetheless produces an overall sense of contemplation and ease. The polish and unity of six compositions with joint credit to Peacock and Copland make it impossible to be sure which parts are written and which spontaneously created. Other provocative performances are of “All Blues” and “Blue in Green,” associated with Miles Davis; a spritely take on Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way;” Copland’s “River Run,” all shimmer and mystery; and Peacock jauntily plucking the lead in the 80-year-old standard, “Sweet and Lovely.”
Copland goes it Alone beginning with a softly insistent A-natural struck beneath the melody of Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes.” As the piece blooms, he returns to the ostinato now and then, a remembrance of things past. The figure helps frame the performance’s sense of longing or nostalgia that continues through Joni Mitchell’s “I Don’t Know Where I Stand.” Later, two other Mitchell songs become parts of an expressive whole in which Copland combines ten discrete compositions into a suite centered in wistfulness but not, perhaps, regret. His “Night Whispers,” “Into The Silence” and “Blackboard” are facets in the pensiveness, as are meditative abstractions on Stordahl and Weston’s “I Should Care,” Wayne Shorter’s “Fall,” and Bronislau Kaper’s “Hi Lili Hi Lo” bringing us to the end with another ostinato, this time in C-major.
A news release that arrived with the CD has a quote from Copland.

There’s no cut and dried technique other than this:
The desire, when playing, not to hit a single note or a single chord unless
It has a certain touch, a certain blend, a certain feel.

Copland has all of that, and these albums have staying power.
Freddie Hubbard, Without A Song (Blue Note). This collection of concert performances in England, previously unissued, captures the entire trumpeter. That means you get the daring explorer of chords, the exhibitionist technician and the balladeer who could break hearts with his lyricism. There are moments, as on “Space Track,” in which Hubbard is so unrestrained as to overwhelm the listener. There are others, notably in a long, wondrous version of “The Things We Did Last Summer,” when his tenderness makes you forgive him anything. The discovery of the music on this CD helps fill out a vital chapter of Hubbard’s touring career and makes his loss a year ago all the more regrettable. It is a logical companion to his MPS studio album The Hub of Hubbard, also recorded in December, 1969. The rhythm section is nearly the same in both, pianist Roland Hanna and drummer Louis Hayes, with Ron Carter on bass in England and Richard Davis in Germany.
BRIEFLY
Dan Nimmer, Yours Is My Heart Alone (Venus). The fleet young pianist of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra recruits the ace rhythm team of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash for an eclectic mix of standards, jazz classics and two of his own pieces. Surprise: Nimmer’s joyous treatment of the Gil Evans rarity “Jambangle.” No surprise: the bow to his hero Oscar Peterson with Peterson’s arrangement of the title tune. Special treats: Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo,” with a powerful Washington bass solo, and a driving “Falling in Love With Love.”
Sachal Vasandani, We Move (MackAvenue). Vasandani’s singing faintly suggests Kurt Elling, but that is less a matter of emulation than a similarity of attitude toward material. Without making an attempt, always doomed, to define jazz singing, suffice it to say that Vasandani does it and does it well. Jazz is in his phrasing, intonation and dynamics, whether on a chestnut like “Don’t Worry About Me” or his own songs “Every Ocean, Every Star” and the title tune. His voice has a reedy quality that maintains through the registers of his considerable range and his note manipulations.
Bob Green, St. Peter Street Strutters (Delmark). Bob Green is a pianist from New York, one of the world’s most dedicated Jelly Roll Morton specialists, now 88. He recorded this album at Preservation Hall in 1964 when he was visiting New Orleans. He plays the whey out of “Wolverine Blues,” “The Pearls,” “Sweet Substitute,” King Oliver’s “Snake Rag” and W.C. Handy’s “Atlanta Blues,” among others; fifteen pieces in all. The band’s unusual instrumentation is piano, cornet (Ernie Carson), banjo (Steve Larner) and tuba (Shorty Johnson). I hadn’t listened to Green for years and put this on wondering if he was as much fun as I remembered. He was.

I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don’t even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style, hell, they’re all Jelly Roll style. –Jelly Roll Morton

When Jelly Roll said that he wrote his first jazz tunes in 1902, or that he used scat-singing as far back as 1907, there is not only no proof to the contrary, but Jelly’s own considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation. –Gunther Schuller in Early Jazz

He could back up everything he said by what he could do. –Omer Simeon

Film producer Andrew Thomas writes with news of what perhaps everyone but Jack Berry and I knew:

Like many fans of Vince Guaraldi, I make sure that Google sends me an alert every time he’s mentioned in posts and blogs, so I was directed to this Rifftides page.
I was surprised by your suggestion that there is little evidence of Vince on film or tape. There is actually a decent amount, and much of it is included in the feature-length documentary I premiered with my partner Toby Gleason at the Monterey Jazz Festival last September — including Vince on screen performing “Star Song” (with Bola Sete both in studio and live at the Trident), “Treat Street”, “Samba de Orpheus”, and more…. as well as film of Vince rehearsing with the choir for the Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass, and performing on the road at various universities. (These are beyond the three Jazz Casual programs on which he appeared, and all of it restored and transferred in high definition… unlike those YouTube clips that someone ripped-off and posted without regard to quality or copyright.)
Of course, it’s not hours of performance footage… but the program is scored using rare unpublished Vince recordings (from his private collection), as well as new performances by George Winston, Jon Hendricks and several others, and conversations with Dave Brubeck, John Handy, Dick Gregory, and… well, there are quite a few people who participated. Vince himself is featured in extensive on camera interviews as well.
The film is called “The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi”, and more information can be found at http://www.anatomyofvinceguaraldi.com
We’re hoping that it will be in release both theatrically and on home video this year, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

If that happens, I’ll look forward to reviewing the film.

On a New Years eve in the mid-1960s, my wife and I attended a dance with music by Duke Elllington. At midnight, Ellington nodded casually and the band concocted a head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” that sounded very much like this. As you listen, please accept the wishes of the Rifftides staff for a perfect 2010.

2009 brought to the Rifftides doorstep an unprecedented number of albums hoping for attention. If I had listened all day every day this year, I could not have paid proper attention to even a small percentage of them. I have been attempting to catch up with some of the CDs in the stacks that occupy what’s left of my floor space (shelves are no longer available). In this series of posts, I will call to your attention a few of them. Some of these items will be not so much reviews as listening suggestions. I won’t bother you with music that bores or disappoints me, and I know that I run the risk of overlooking a masterpiece. C’est la vie et à l’écoute.
Plunge, Dancing On Thin Ice (Immersion). Plunge is among the best post-Katrina jazz developments in New Orleans music. In the city’s tradition of absorbing, assimilating and combining disparate elements, this unorthodox trio is indeed on thin ice at times, without losing sight of the shore of New Orleans convention. Trombonist Mark McGrain, saxophonist Tim Green and bassist James Singleton are out there with chancy harmonies, elastic time and forays into electronics, but they are also inside the blues and slow-drag feelings of their city. They generate moments reminiscent of music as various as the Jimmy Giuffre trio’s folksiness, 1960s free experimentalism, and that long march to the cemetery uptown or out by the lake. This is a lot of music from three people. The deep tones of Singleton’s bass are as evocative in Plunge as in Rhythm Is Our Business (Storyville). Svend Asmussen, Makin’ Whoopee…And Music (Arbors).
Asmussen turned 93 three days ago. He is not as overtly astonishing a violinist in the Arbors CD recorded this year as he was when he made the tracks in the Storyville compilation in 1953 and 1958. He is a deeper one. In the reissue, the novelty recordings that helped make him a Danish national figure include a couple of his vocals that are discomforting on grounds of taste (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny”) or execution (his rush through “Darktown Strutters Ball”), but there is little of that. His playing is impeccable throughout and in several places palpably exciting. He has two exquisite duets with guitarist Ulrik Neumann.
On Makin’ Whoopee, if the nonagenerian Asmussen is less acrobatic than his 45-year-old self and slightly less sure of bow, his tone is darker, his expressiveness deeper, his celebrated harmonic sense intact and his swing steady. Highlights: his samba called “Fiddler in Rio,” a gorgeous reading of Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages” and a swaggering solo in Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Among his accompanists, pianist Richard Drexler and Asmussen’s longtime guitarist Jacob Fischer are superb.
Ithamara Koorax & Juarez Moreira, Bim Bom: The Complete João Gilberto Songbook (Motéma). Gilberto’s influence on Brazilian and much of the other music of our time has been pervasive for half a century. Yet, his repertoire primarily consists of songs composed by others, most prominently Antonio Carlos Jobim. In the development of modern samba Jobim was to Gilberto as Dizzy Gillespie said Charlie Parker was to him in bebop, the other half of his heartbeat. Gilberto has written only 11 songs, most of them less familiar than “Bim Bom,” each of them exquisite in its own way. This gem of an album by the Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax and guitarist Juarez Moreira gathers all of Gilberto’s songs under one cover for the first time. Gilberto himself has never done that. The purity and tonal accuracy of Koorax’s voice, the perfection of her phrasing and interpretation, beautifully serve the songs in ways that should delight the composer. Moreira accompanies her with subtlety and harmonic resourcefulness that suggest Gilberto’s own guitar playing. He has two tracks to himself. You may be familiar with “Bim Bom,” “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” and “Minha Saudade,” but unless you’re a Gilberto completist, “Vôce Esteve Com Meu Bem?” “Bebel” and the others may be new to you. Koorax and Moreira are a fine way to meet them. Early in the collection, Koorax sings “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” in Portuguese and later, in a separate track, in flawlessly unaccented English. I’d be hard-pressed to say which is the more charming.

This seems to be the week for unexpected videos to materialize. In the piece highlighted in the previous exhibit, Jack Berry joined me in lamenting that we could find no evidence of Vince Guaraldi on film or tape. Jazz writer Ken Dryden came to the rescue this morning with a reminder that Guaraldi’s trio backed Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster in a 1962 episode of Ralph J. Gleason’s Jazz Casual program on PBS. Here are two excerpts recalling one of the great singer-instrumentalist partnerships. There is no Guaraldi solo, but superb accompaniment by him, drummer Colin Bailey and a bassist hidden behind Witherspoon who is most likely Monty Budwig.

The Witherspoon-Webster encounter is available on a DVD with another Jazz Casual show devoted to Jimmy Rushing.
And here is Guaraldi finally getting to solo. This is a latterday version of the piece that twenty years earlier had made Webster famous when he was with Duke Ellington.

The recent reissue of music by Vince Guaraldi and subsequent Rifftides and radio ramblings led the veteran print and broadcast journalist Jack Berry to grace a new web site with an account of a piquant Guaraldi adventure. It has to do with Vince’s ability to make lemonade.

When he climbed up on the bench and began his first tune, however, something ominous occurred. There was an entirely dead note on the piano. Guaraldi halted the song and looked into the middle distance with an expression of deep bemusement.
“Here’s trouble,” I predicted to Ms. Hoffman.
Guaraldi tapped the dead note, tentatively at first, then with increasing violence. THUNK, THUNK, THUNK. Dropping his head, he thought for a moment, then began gently tapping the conspicuously expired key.

To read all of Berry’s piece, go to Oregon Music News. It is good to know that he will be contributing often to that site.

When Terry Pollard died the other day, I scoured the internet in hopes of finding video of her playing. I had no luck. But moments ago, Mark Stryker of The Detroit Free Press notified me that a clip has appeared on YouTube of the pianist in Terry Gibbs’s quartet on The Tonight Show in 1956. They play “Gibberish,” on the harmonic pattern of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” then a riotous vibes duet on the Charlie Parker blues “Now’s The Time” with Tonight Show host Steve Allen accompanying on piano. This is an unexpected treasure.

In his accompanying e-mail, Stryker asks:

… while her piano playing is really out of Bud, after watching the clip a couple times, I hear some similarities with early Horace Silver in the pinging evenness of her articulation, the blues allusions and the rumble in her left hand. Do you hear this or am I imagining — Blue Note trio Horace, when he was still playing long 8th note lines, before he distilled his right hand into short, jabbing ideas.

Yes, and I detect in Pollard’s work another derivative of Bud Powell’s influence, that of Hampton Hawes. Pollard spent some time with Gibbs on the west coast when Hawes was at his peak.
But, influences, schminfluences; she was an original.
Pollard’s only album as a leader was a 10-inch vinyl LP on the Bethlehem label, recorded in 1955, less than a year before the Tonight Show appearance. Her quintet included guitarist Howard Roberts and the brilliant trumpter Don Fagerquist. It was never reissued on a 12″ LP, much less on a CD. The 10-incher shows up on e-Bay and other web sites as an expensive auction item. But three tracks of the Terry Pollard LP are included on this CD compilation of performances by Fagerquist, who died in 1974 at the age of 46.