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John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Eternal Interlude (Sunnyside). The ensemble is Large, all right, in the size of the band — 20 pieces — and in the expansiveness of Hollenbeck’s vision. He is a composer who moves into, out of and beyond established categories of musical thinking and a drummer who brilliantly meets the challenges he sets himself in his writing. Drawing on his mentor Bob Brookmeyer’s example of originality and fearless innovation, Hollenbeck tempers the contemporaneity of his ideas with glances into the rear-view mirror of his creative imagination. Hence, his amusing expansion of the main idea of Thelonious Monk’s “Four In One” into “Foreign One.” Gary Versace’s neo-boogie piano introduction sets up an expanding and contracting field of rhythmic patterns, orchestral textures and solos. It ends in a fiesta of intersecting lines across the brass and reeds, melding into 18 concluding quarter notes struck in unison on piano and cymbals, as insistent as a railroad crossing’s warning signal.
“Eternal Interlude,” the title piece, is nearly 20 minutes of impressionism in which the sensation of floating is sustained through energy created by the contrast between long ensemble tones centered on flutes, and percussive effects of marimba, piano and drums. In this piece, the exquisite subtlety in Hollenbeck’s writing is reminiscent of what the late Gary McFarland used to achieve with woodwinds. Much the same can be said of “The Cloud,” which has the added elements of whistlers, a section of aphorisms spoken by Theo Bleckmann and Bleckmann’s wordless vocalizing. “Perseverance” comes as close to traditional big band writing as we’re likely to hear from Hollenbeck. The resemblance is mostly in contrapuntal lines between brass and reeds, a succession of rowsing, even rowdy, saxophone solos and a masterly drum solo.
In “Guarana,” infectious Latin rhythms and minimalist repetition work hand in hand. “No Boat” is a two-minute tone poem, full-bodied but subdued. It has the effect of a closing prayer.

Linda Oh, Entry (Linda Oh Music). Oh is a 25-year-old Chinese from Malaysia who grew up in Australia, plays bass and has a Masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Her music, as eclectic as she, eludes classification except as fresh and uncompromising. She achieves remarkable unity using spare instrumentation, nicely crafted compositions and sidemen who listen closely and react to her, as she does to them. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire share Oh’s instrumental skill and her economical application of it. Her acoustic bass sound is firm, clear and deep. She has no evident tendency toward invading guitar territory, as many young bassists do, and she makes satisfying note choices even in material that might encourage the randomness of free jazz.
The music has moments of annunciatory boldness–there is a kind of bebop fanfare in “Gunners”–but even at its most complex and active, Oh, Akinmusire and Calvaire exercise the restraint of artistic judgment. In “Numero Uno,” Akinmusire overdubs himself into a brass choir of contrapuntal voices before the piece evolves into a series of thoughtful solos and a stretch of interactive improvisation. The swift “Fourth Limb” is all three-way interaction for its first half, with sparkling trumpet work from Akinmusire over Calvaire’s pointillist drumming, then a bass solo that manages coherence at a demanding tempo. Though the CD package gives no composer credits, all of the pieces but one seem to be by Oh. The album concludes with the contrast of intensity and, ultimately, peacefulness in a cover of The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Soul to Squeeze.” This is the debut recording of a musician who leaves the listener with a keen sense that she knows who she is and where she is headed. It is available as a CD here or an MP3 download here.

Because of the high volume of comments Rifftides received following our piece on the death of pianist Eddie Higgins, the staff thought there might be widespread interest in a memorial concert. We bring you the announcement as it arrived by e-mail from Florida. This will give you time to make plans to fly in from, say, Tokyo or St. Thomas.

There will be a Jam Session tribute
to Eddie Higgins
on Sunday, December 6
from 4pm to 6pm
in the ArtServe auditorium at 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd.
(Ft. Lauderdale Library branch)

Haydn (Eddie) Higgins 1932 to 2009

Pot Luck finger food, please. Soft drinks provided. BYOB.

Free admission.

Contributions to the Haydn (Eddie) Higgins Memorial Music Scholarship Fund
will be gratefully appreciated.
For information about the jam session and scholarship, call 954-524-0805.

I think Haydn would like the BYOB part.

Family members and friends are planning a memorial service for Stacy Rowles. No date has been set. The trumpeter and singer died at home in Burbank, California, on October 27 of injuries from an automobile accident two weeks earlier. She was 54. The daughter of pianist Jimmy Rowles, she studied piano for a time. Despite her father’s example, she was not attracted to the instrument. She eventually tried an old trumpet that was in the Rowles house and immediately took to it. The vibraphonist and teacher Charlie Shoemake, with whom she studied for a time, told me today, “Stacy was a natural talent. She listened to the right people, and her ear took her to the right places.”
Ms. Rowles and her father co-led a group in Los Angeles for a time in the early 1990s. She recorded three albums with him. They included Me And The Moon, which featured her on flugelhorn and as a singer. Jimmy Rowles died in 1996. Me And The Moon is an out-of-print collector’s item. Jazz enthusiast and frequent Rifftides correspondent Gordon Sapsed used the title tune as the soundtrack for a tribute montage of his photos of Stacy. He posted it on YouTube. Both Rowleses play and sing.

Also on YouTube, but off-limits to embedding bloggers, are two performances by Swinging Ladies, one of several all-female groups with which Stacy Rowles played. They are from a concert in front of Hannover, Germany’s, imposing town hall, the Rathaus, in 1998. With her are Sharon Hirata; alto and tenor saxophone; Janice Friedmann, piano; Lindy Huppertsberg, bass; and Jill Fredericksen, drums. You will find them by clicking here and here.

Bill Crow’s column, The Band Room, has for decades been a feature of Allegro, the monthly publication of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. He fills it with what he is most famous for after his bass playing, anecdotes about musicians. Sometimes the stories concern well-known performers, sometimes less celebrated journeymen. It took me a couple of minutes to recover from the one that follows.

The Rifftides series of posts on improving hearing by listening to bass lines leads inevitably to Scott LaFaro. It was less LaFaro’s virtuosity that made a difference in the role of the bass than the uncanny group thinking and interaction he made possible in the Bill Evans Trio. LaFaro was what Evans had been looking for, dreaming of, a bassist who thought about music, and specifically about time, as the pianist did. There is an invaluable pre-LaFaro Evans album with his friend Don Elliott, the multi-instrumentalist. The CD consists of informal rehearsals at Elliott’s house in 1956 and ’57. I reviewed it for JazzTimes eight years ago. Here is the applicable section of the review.

In a snippet of conversation at the end of their workout on the changes of “Doxy” (misidentified in the booklet as “Blues #2”), Evans talks about his ideal of group interaction.
Evans: “I like to blow free like that, with no ‘four’ going, but you know where you’re at. It’s crazy. If everybody could do that, if the bass could be playing that way –why not– drums could just…” (he vocalizes in imitation of a drummer playing free).
Elliott: “That’s right; doesn’t have to help you.”
Evans: “Not if everybody feels it, man.”
It would be 1959 before Evans put bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian together in a group in which everybody felt his way of playing time. They went on to reform the very idea of the jazz trio, but this glimpse into his thinking tells us that Evans was ready years earlier.

LaFaro may have felt ready when Evans was expressing his vision to Elliott, but he was on the west coast, a 21-year-old still developing. There is precious little of him on record from his Los Angeles days. Two recordings, one with Victor Feldman, the other with Cal Tjader and Stan Getz, provide strong indications of his growing musicality and technical prowess.
There is even less of early LaFaro on film or tape, to my knowledge only two pieces, both from Bobby Troup’s Stars of Jazz television program. LaFaro was in tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca’s formidable quintet with Feldman on piano, trombonist Frank Rosolino and drummer Stan Levey. Here are both of those clips, “Cherry” and “Chart of my Heart.” The video quality is dreadful and there are audio dropouts, but this is our only option for seeing Scott LaFaro in action. If your speakers have tone controls, turn up the bass setting and you’ll find it easier to follow his lines.

There is no video of the Evans trio with LaFaro and Motian. Their primary recorded legacy is in Portrait in Jazz, Explorations and Sunday at the Village Vanguard. The CD titled Waltz for Debby was compiled from the Vanguard date. This is its title tune, decorated with a photo montage courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube.

That was June 25, 1961. Twelve days later, Scott LaFaro died at the wheel of his automobile when it crashed in upstate New York. He was 25 years old.
It would be inaccurate, but not grossly inaccurate, to say that no jazz bassist who emerged from the 1960s onward developed free of debt to LaFaro. To the extent that Evans, LaFaro and Motian changed the concept of the piano trio–and that is a considerable extent–LaFaro’s influence extends much further than the bass.

For the new segment of our adventure in letting bassists be our guides, author, critic and sometime Rifftides commentator Larry Kart has a fine idea.

May I suggest, for Part 4, Paul Chambers behind Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb on “So What.” Like Heath and LaFaro in their various ways, where Chambers puts “one” is a place where no one who’s playing with him literally is, but it’s a place that all can touch and play off of. I think that’s a fairly basic (no play on words intended) general principle.

Good suggestion. The performance is from a 1959 episode of The Robert Herridge Theater on CBS-TV. Herridge introduces the program and the piece. Gil Evans leads the orchestra, whose function in this clip is to set the mood for “So What.”

In the days when I was learning to truly listen, Red Kelly gave me a piece of valuable advice. He told me to close my eyes and in my mind isolate and concentrate on the bass player. He said that when I felt and understood what the bassist was doing, the rest of the music would begin to fall into place. It was a coincidence, of course, that Red was a bass player.

As an impoverished student, I had a limited record collection. It consisted of a dozen or so 10-inch LPs, and it happened that Percy Heath was the bassist on about half of them, with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet, then a new group.

Red’s advice was invaluable. To this day, I lock in on the bassist for a blueprint to the shape of a piece, and I am still fascinated by Heath’s bass lines. In the following performance by the MJQ of Milt Jackson’s blues “Bag’s Groove,” Percy is in customary form with his spacious but concentrated tone, impeccable note choices and irresistible swing. This is from the Zelt festival in Freiburg, Germany, in 1987. The video producers insert a title misnaming the tune. A German YouTube viewer reacts in the comment section:

“das insert “BACKGROOVE” ist richtig peinlich!”

“Really embarrassing,” he says. Well, yes, but not as embarrassing as the director, asleep at the switch, who keeps the camera on John Lewis during all three choruses of Heath’s bass solo. Nonetheless, this is a splendid performance. You may as well close your eyes and focus your attention on Percy’s notes because you’re going to see little of him.

Red Kelly is the bassist on Kenton At The Tropicana, one of the best live albums in Stan Kenton’s discography. Backed by the Kenton trombones, Red also appears as featured vocalist on the heartbreaking ballad “You and I and George.” In a small group setting on another album, he is with his friend and fellow bassist Red Mitchell and guitarist Jim Hall in the classic Good Friday Blues, now packaged with other Hall recordings in a CD called Blues On The Rocks. Mitchell plays piano and leaves the bass work to Kelly.

The television comic Soupy Sales loved jazz, knew its history and many of its leading players. Early in his career, when he had a local show in Detroit, he frequently presented jazz stars as guests. After Sales died on October 22 at the age of 83, many obituaries mentioned that the only known video of Clifford Brown performing is from a kinescope recording of the Sales show. For decades, it was assumed lost, but Sales found the film in his garage in the mid-1990s. Here is the trumpeter in February, 1956, five months before he died at 26 in an auto crash, playing “Lady Be Good” and “Memories of You.”

In his blog I Witness, Ed Leimbacher muses about the pervasiveness of Thelonious Monk as a model for or influence on other pianists. In an essay packed with album citations, he acknowledges 18 pianists from Jelly Roll Morton to Keith Jarrett who have made an impact, then writes:

Reviewing the Art Farmer Jazz Icons DVD the other day stimulated thoughts of his unique place in the pantheon of major jazz soloists. I started to write them, then realized that I already had. Here is an excerpt from the Farmer chapter of my book Jazz Matters.

Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard ventures into the jazz wilds of the US capital in search of live music and reports to Rifftides readers on what he hears. This time, the event was a tribute concert.

A few times you’ve linked to Amazon listings for Venus releases, such as the Charlap/NY Trio disc in your new set of picks. Just a caveat about this, of which you may be aware. These are CD-Rs with reprinted liner booklets and info. Obviously the price reflects this and Amazon and Venus are to be applauded for offering this important music at a more reasonable price stateside. However, I picked up a Kenny Barron CD recently and the inserts listed nothing but the musicians’ names and song selections. There was no recording date nor were there composer credits. As something of a fanatic about this sort of information, it was disappointing. Perhaps there was a translation issue involved. In any event, I wanted to mention this to you.
Rich Juliano

This is the 92nd anniversary of Dizzy Gillespie’s birth. There are many ways to celebrate it. The Rifftides staff offers two. The first video is from the Bern Jazz Festival in 1985. The band is Dizzy, James Moody, Gene Harris, Ray Brown and Grady Tate. The tune is “Ow.” It was made famous by the great Gillespie big band of the 1940s. So were Moody and Brown.
The second clip is from the 1979 Newport Jazz Festival in Nice, France. With Gillespie are Arnie Lawrence, alto sax; Stan Getz, tenor sax; John Lewis, piano; George Duvivier, bass; and Shelly Manne, drums. The piece is Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing.”

Let’s wrap up the Fall Festival at The Seasons. Here are brief reports about the final four events.
• Africa: The Power of Drum and Dance: Michael Wimberly, a percussionist and composer from New York, performed with scores of sidemen and sidewomen. They were professional drummers, dancers and singers from his troupe; students from several middle schools and high schools; a contingent from the Yakima Valley Community College jazz ensemble; and a band of marimbists, if that’s the term, who played marimbas of all sizes from small to preposterously large. Building on traditional African rhythms, Wimberly morphed his flexible supporting cast into several percussion and dance combinations delivering aural and visual excitement that had the audience in a packed house grooving in their seats. It was a spectacle that had the added impact of opening up a hundred or so youngsters to roots music that can enrich their lives. The joy on their faces seemed to show that the process was underway.
• The Matt Wilson Quartet. Wilson alone can be a spectacle. Fresh from the cover of Down Beat magazine, the drummer brought to the festival saxophonist Jeff Lederer, trumpeter Kirk Knuffke and bassist Chris Lightcap. Six of their ten pieces were from his most recent CD, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark. Their intensity was enhanced by the energy Wilson generates in live performance and transmits to musicians and audience. He kicked off a furious tempo for John Lewis’s “Two Bass Hit,” a staple of Dizzy Gillespie’s 1940s big band. Lederer soloed with essence of Coltrane, Knuffke with impressive thematic development, Lightcap with lyricism, the true wood sound of the bass and (hooray) little volume on his amplifier. Through the evening, Wilson surged, roared and crackled beneath the ensemble and the soloists, a continuously renewable source of power. Other highlights of the set: Lederer coming out of an abstracted arrangement of “Don’t Blame Me” into a gorgeous tenor saxophone solo on the tune’s changes, then a pure statement of the melody; his wild clarinet solo on “Rear Control;” Knuffke’s ability to produce a sound like Chet Baker’s one minute and Wadada Leo Smith’s the next; The contrast between Wilson’s manic shenanigans in a spoof of heavy metal called “Schoolboy Thug” and the peacefulness of the encore, a prayerful ensemble reading of the Scottish Presbyterian hymn “Come and Find the Quiet Center.”
• Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra. In addition to percussionist Wimberly’s work with young musicians, the primary educational activity of The Seasons Fall Festival was the development of emerging composers and conductors from all regions of the United States. The composers studied under the guidance of Daron Hagen, Chris Brubeck, Gilda Lyons and Robert Frankenberry. The emerging conductors worked with retiring Yakima Symphony Orchestra conductor Brooke Cresswell (pictured) and one of Cresswell’s mentors, Donald Thulean, a veteran conductor of several orchestras. The evening began with the world premiere of Cicadas, Lyons’ atmospheric evocation of a childhood memory of seventeen-year cicadas swarming. It ended with Hagen’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra, featuring violinist Simon James and cellist Kevin Krentz. In between, the audience heard the culmination of a week of workshops and rehearsals. Each young conductor led the orchestra in a piece by one of the young composers. The seven new compositions ran about four minutes apeice. They showed enormous potential from a group of musicians, one only 16 years old, whose work should give heart to anyone concerned about the future of serious music in America.
• Dena DeRose. On the eve of her return to Graz, Austria, where she is a professor at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts, the pianist and singer demonstrated her qualifications in both areas. Her playing and singing are musical in the extreme and, when she digs into the rhythm with the zeal she displayed Saturday night, dramatic. Matt Wilson and Chris Lightcap joined DeRose for the festival’s final concert, creating a trio with extraordinary cohesion and singleness of purpose. There were moments when the three were swinging as hard as any piano trio I have heard. The interaction between Wilson and the pianist was remarkable. DeRose’s celebrated improvisation of lines with voice and keyboard in parallel was never a gimmick, the integration so subtle that it took the listener a few seconds to realize what was producing that unique blend of sound. The technique has been used since at least as far back as the great Joe Mooney, but rarely with DeRose’s musicianship and finesse. Whether in a standard like “How Deep is the Ocean?” or the relatively unfamiliar ballad “In the Glow of the Moon,” DeRose’s singing was perfect in pitch, phrasing, interpretation and pleasure in performing. Most of The Seasons audience arrived with little or no previous knowledge of DeRose. They are unlikely to forget the finale that she provided a memorable festival.