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Bill Evans had precise intellectual understanding of everything he did in his playing. However, like most superior improvisers, he developed his skill and knowledge to the point where he could set aside concentration on keyboard technique and the elements of musical language in order to achieve an unfettered flow of creativity in the spontaneous act of playing jazz. On occasions when he talked about the nature of improvisation, Evans spoke with exactitude and coherence to match his expressiveness at the piano. The most widely known example of his verbal eloquence is in conversation with his brother Harry, a music educator, in a 1966 television program called The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, which is available on DVD.

Now, three revealing video clips have surfaced. They were taped nearly thirty years ago at a private house concert in Finland. The Evans trio played and he talked with his hosts about his music-making. Asked how far the intellect goes in playing jazz, he replied:

Only as far as being a student. You couldn’t manipulate yourself fast enough intellectually, to play. I mean jazz is a certain process that is not an intellectual process. You use your intellect to take apart the materials and learn to understand them and learn to work with them. But, actually, it takes years and years of playing to develop the facility so that you can forget all of that and just relax, and just play.

 At the end of the third sequence, bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Marty Morrell, also speak. These You Tube clips are apparently from a television program that aired in Helsinki. As far as I’ve been able to discover, they have never been commercially available. This was about a decade before Evans’ death in 1980. Relaxed in comfortable surroundings and congenial company, he even smiles, a rarity in video recordings of Evans. The first clip has Evans speaking.

The two remaining clips have the Evans trio playing “Alfie” and “Nardis.” You can view them by clicking here and here.

The Rifftides staff is still catching up with recent CDs, some more recent than others.

Sheila Jordan, Winter Sunshine (Justin Time). The first word in the CD’s title may refer to

Jordan’s age, the second to the quality of her singing. She is seventy-nine and sounds thirty. Part of her schtick in this live recording at Montreal’s Upstairs club is to tell the audience how tired she is, but she doesn’t sound tired. She sounds like a young bebop and ballad singer with sunshine in her voice.  If there must be scatting, let it be the kind of canny scatting Jordan does in “I Remember You” and her montage of “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” and “Little Willie Leaps.” She praises pianist Steve Amirault, bassist Kieran Overs and drummer André White…for good reason. The chatter between songs wears thin after two or three hearings, but it is on separate tracks, and most CD players are programmable.

Mike Longo, Float Like a Butterfly (CAP). I hope that before Oscar Peterson died last December he had a chance to hear Longo’s treatment of “Tenderly” in this 2007 CD. Longo emulates the first chorus of the master’s famous 1952 recording, then pursues his own muse with forthrightness, imagination and relaxed swing. Peterson would no doubt have been pleased with his prize student on both counts. Longo’s longtime confreres Paul West and Jimmy Wormworth are the bassist and drummer. The trio plays a couple of the leader’s own tunes and explores several by Monk, Gillespie, Shorter, Hubbard, Raksin, Van Heusen, Schwartz and others. This is an unpretentious and deeply satisfying recording, nowhere more so than in Longo’s clever blues “Diminished Returns.”

Kenny Garrett, Sketches of MD: Live At The Iridium (Mack Avenue). The alto saxophonist eases off his customary Coltrane modal intensity for a club date incorporating soul, neo-Africanisms and synthesizer funk. The MD of the title refers to Garrett’s stint with Miles Davis

in the trumpeter’s late electronic period. The veteran tenor saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders brings to the proceedings an earthiness that rubs off on Garrett. Or is it vice versa? The rhythm section of bassist Nat Reeves, drummer Jamire Williams and keyboard player Benito Gonzalez provides the hypnotic backgrounds in this album of good-natured party music.

When Marc Myers at JazzWax.com decides to solve a mystery, he goes into full Sherlock Holmes mode. He has done that in an attempt to track down the complete personnel of the Shorty Rogers combo in the Looney Tunes cartoon Three Little Bops, which ran last week on Rifftides. I agree with critic Larry Kart’s conclusion that the baritone saxophonist is

Jimmy Giuffre. Follow this link to see the cartoon again and read Kart’s message. Giuffre worked often with Rogers in the 1950s, and the baritone in the film has the sound of Giuffre’s celebrated spoof R&B hit “Big Girl” with the Lighthouse All-Stars (CD cover pictured). Myers takes an interesting route to reach another conclusion about the baritone player. His detective work produces plausible speculation about the identities of the bassist, drummer and guitarist. See Marc’s posting here.

What matters most is that a delightful cartoon period piece is getting renewed attention. Still, if anyone out there in cyberspace has definite information about the makeup of the band, please let us know by way of the comment link below.

David Sherr, OtherWorld Music (Bel Air Jazz). Sherr is a composer and player of reed instruments and flutes. His background includes work with Sonny Criss, the San Francisco Ballet, Nelson Riddle, Lalo Schifrin, Don Ellis, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Frank Zappa, Oliver Nelson, Robert Craft, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, among several dozen others from assorted fields of music. In this CD, he brings together extensive portions of his music with that of J.S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen.

Sherr enlists members of the Bach Aria Group and superb jazz musicians including drummer Joe La Barbera, pianist Tom Ranier and bassist Harvey Newmark. His unaccompanied clarinet exposition of the third movement of Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time is brilliantly executed. He integrates free jazz with elements of Messiaen’s formidable quartet and succeeds in making all but the most perceptive and experienced listeners wonder about the line between what is written and what is improvised. In his “…Then Have I The Eagle’s Powers, Then Soar I Up From This World,” Sherr accomplishes a similar feat with themes from Bach’s “Aria” from Cantata 56. In it, voices deliver lines in several languages as if they were instruments in counterpoint, the jazz players free-associate with one another at a high level and a solo violin melds with the entrance to the next piece, Messiaen’s flute-piano duet “Le Merle Noir.”

This is music full of rich satisfactions, more of which become apparent on successive hearings. If Sherr attracts the attention he should with this unconventional and intriguing project on an obscure label, we will undoutedly be hearing more from him.

In his teenage years during the waning days of the big band era, Sherr went on the road as a saxophone player. His web site contains a long, occasionally disturbing and very funny journal of that experience. Here’s a sample.

Ernie Fields And His World Famous Orchestra, that’s us. A big hit record, a couple of smaller hits, the Dick Clark Show, the Regal theater, the country’s Number One R&B band and bookings in some pretty classy joints, like the one the other night near Dallas. And then again…

Tonight it was Temple, Texas, just south of Waco. (Wyatt has been calling it “Whacko” since this morning.) The sign over the entrance said “Rec Center” but “wreck center” would have been more like it. It had broken windows and chairs, a tiny stage and a piano that may never have been tuned. Roosevelt counted thirteen keys that didn’t work. He tried to get around the missing notes and wound up sounding like Thelonious Monk.

Billy’s bass drum kept slipping. He took a hammer he kept for such emergencies and drove a couple of nails into the rotting floor of the stage to brace the drum. The guy in charge of the building screamed, “What are you doing to my stage,” and ordered him to remove the nails. Bill pointed out that the “damage” was already done, so why not leave them in until we were finished, but the guy said no. So Billy pulled the nails and spent the rest of the night trying to keep from kicking the drum off the stage.

To read all of “On The Road At 18,” click here.

 

TWO CDs BRIEFLY NOTED

Philip Catherine, Bert Joris, Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Meeting Colours (Dreyfus). This has

 been out since 2005. I loved the album when I first heard it and just rediscovered it in a stack of review copies. Guitarist Catherine and trumpeter Joris, both Belgian, are the principal soloists in this collection of Joris’s arrangements of Catherine’s compositions (plus Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”) for the superb Brussels Jazz Orchestra. Joris is one of the finest trumpet soloists in the world. His writing is as good as his playing. Catherine, most widely known for his work with Chet Baker, Tom Harrell and Larry Coryell, solos with his customary imagination, economy and love for Wes Montgomery.

Drori Mondlak, Point In Time (Lilypad). Mondlak’s quartet is integrated, balanced and musical, with no show-off features for the drummer leader. Mondlak, saxophonist and flutist Karolina Strassmayer, guitarist Cary DeNigris and bassist Steve LaSpina solo with conviction. Except for Frank Foster’s “Simone,” the pieces are by members of the quartet. The collection might have benefited from more of the grit of DeNigris’s “I’ve Paid Some Blues” and “No Name Blues” and Mondlak’s “The Prance,” but if Mondlak’s aim was to create an atmosphere of thoughtful relaxation, he succeeded. Mondlak has a witty solo on Strassmayer’s “It Once Was a Waltz.” LaSpina’s fluidity and strength are important to the success of this music. Strassmayer’s work shows why she is one of the most interesting alto saxophonists under forty. DeNigris’s and Mondlak’s like-mindedness contribute to the success of the venture.

The Rifftides staff is attempting to keep ahead of the CD tsunami described in this recent post. It’s an impossible assignment, but they’re a game bunch. Herewith, brief reviews of approximately 0.06% of the accumulated mass of discs.

Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy). In some of these previously unreleased concert performances, the tenor saxophonist reaches peaks of the intensity, drive, inventiveness and whimsy that have kept him inimitable for nearly six decades. His “Tenor Madness” solo from Japan in 2000 is one of Rollins’s most compelling recorded blues statements. There’s a remarkable “Easy Living” from Poland in 1980. “More Than You Know,” recorded in France in 2006, concludes with a ravishing extended cadenza that is a tour through the inner workings of a great melodist’s creative process. The most recent track, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from Rollins’s 2007 Carnegie Hall concert, is curiously tentative despite the presence of bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes. The architectonic “Blossoms,” from Sweden in 1980, is anything but tentative. Full of risk-taking, it is twelve-and-a-half minutes of Rollins at his most penetrating and complex.

Mike Melvoin and Kim Park, The Art Of Conversation (City Light). Pianist Melvoin and alto saxophonist Park, veterans who deserve wider recognition, shine in this aptly-named duo collaboration. It grew out of Park’s sitting in on a Melvoin gig in Kansas City. Park makes  engaging personal use of inspiration from his KC predecessor Charlie Parker, notably so in

his visceral, blues-inflected soloing on “I Remember You,” a tune lastingly linked to Parker. The fleetness and harmonic richness of Melvoin’s improvisations are consistent throughout this collection of familiar standard songs. As for justification of that title, he and Park truly listen to and stimulate one another’s ideas, as good conversationalists will. This music is available as a download.

Billy Harper, Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2 (Talking House). Harper was one of the most profound of the tenor saxophonists to emerge in the wake of John Coltrane. This CD, full of post-Coltrane muscle and mysticism, recalls the swirl of free jazz in the sixties and seventies, even unto Amiri Baraka reciting his jazz-history-lesson poetry and Harper on one track singing a little like Leon Thomas did on all those Impulse! LPs. Fronting a relentlessly energetic septet of like-minded seekers, Harper solos with his full range of formidable technical mastery and the power and conviction of a gifted preacher. This CD seems to be hard to get. Although it was released in October, Amazon is the only web site I can find that is offering it. Amazon claims to have just one copy–used–at $90.00 U.S. (!) It may be available as an MP3 download.

Jerry Gonzalez y Los Piratos Del Flamenco (Sunnyside). Since he moved to Madrid, the trumpeter, flugelhornist, conguero and co-leader of the Fort Apache Band has gone well beyond taking an interest in Spain’s flamenco tradition. He has absorbed its mystique and

 even begun to have an effect on its evolution. The closely held flamenco community has let him in and Gonzalez has managed to get them to accept the idea of jazz improvisation in the context of contemporary flamenco performance. In a cultural feedback loop, Gonzalez brings jazz sensibilities inspired by Miles Davis and Gil Evans into the milieu of Spanish music that helped to inspire the classic Davis-Evans album Sketches Of Spain. His venture is a work in progress. This CD demonstrates the results so far. “Monk’s Dream (Monk’s Soniquete)” with Gonzalez overdubbed on multiple horns to the accompaniment of flamenco hand-clapping rhythm is, as they say in Madrid, un viaje.c

Some readers have reported a problem with the links to CD sources in the recent Rifftides piece about Kenny Wheeler and Don Thompson. The links have been remade and should be working fine.

As usual, things are happening in jazz in Philadelphia, the town that produced John Coltrane,
Ray Bryant, Red Rodney, the Heath brothers, Richie Kamuca, Christian McBride, Joe Venuti, Shirley Scott, Jaleel Shaw, Luckey Roberts, Mary Ann McCall, Kenny Barron, Benny Golson, Philly Joe Jones and several Eubankses, to name perhaps ten-percent of the important players from that city. Rifftides reader Oliver Wunsch reports on a new development.

I wanted to share a new site we JUST launched here at Painted Bride Art Center in Philly, that represents our own attempt to marry new media with the jazz compositional process, called Big Ears Philly. The site is a tool for John Hollenbeck and 12 Philly jazz musicians to communicate and refine ideas as they prepare to develop new work during their residency at Painted Bride. Each artist maintains a blog, can post video, and can share audio files of work in progress. It also is obviously designed to bring audiences into this process. So this is just a note to say check it out, and I’ve enjoyed your writing. We’re really looking towards blogs as THE location for jazz journalism these days.

That seems to be the way things are going, Mr. Wunsch. See this recent posting.

On election day, the Providence Journal ran two editorials concerning matters important to Rhode Islanders. One was about the governor’s suggestion that it’s time to end the  state income tax (a questionable idea, the paper said). The other was on the death of pianist Dave McKenna, one of the state’s cultural heroes. To read the Mckenna editorial, go here. Thanks to Rifftides reader Steve Caminis for calling it to our attention.

For the October 18 announcement of McKenna’s death, video of him playing and reader comments, go to this Rifftides archive page.

Rifftides reader Ken Dryden writes:

It’s funny, but I discovered Joe Sullivan the same way I found out about Meade Lux Lewis, when rocker Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake & Palmer) recorded one of his pieces, “Little Rock Getaway.” Though there was very little in print of Sullivan’s work under his own name in the early 1970s, I managed to find a couple of LPs. He was also one of the pianists featured in Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual series, issued on a Koch CD with the Earl Hines performance and likely on DVD/VHS in the series.

(In the Jazz Casual series, the Sullivan program is paired with one featuring cornetist Muggsy Spanier. — DR)

This is Joe Sullivan’s birthday. Although Rifftides posted an item about Sullivan and others only three months ago, it is never too soon to call him to the attention of listeners who may not have made the acquaintance of a man who inspired countless other pianists. Here is a Rifftides golden oldie.

It is not good enough simply to recycle an archive piece. As a double bonus, here are two versions of Sullivan’s most famous composition, “Little Rock Getaway.” The first is his 1933 Parlophone recording, the second the Decca recording from 1935, by which time he had shaped the famous melody line.

If Sullivan were alive, he would be 102 years old. He died on October 13, 1971.

Newspapers everywhere were retrenching even before the world financial crisis tetered on the edge of recession and finally fell into it. Declining readership and shriveling advertising revenue demanded cost-cutting. To no one’s surprise, staff and space reductions claimed arts coverage early. When newsroom budgets start to shrink, cultural journalism is among the first targets because editors know that there will be relatively few complaints. In a world of minuscule and increasingly fragmented attention spans focused (ha) on hip-hop, Britney Spears and movies about high school musicals, jazz is even more a minority interest than string quartets, modern dance and bagpipe solos.

Jazz writers still appear sporadically in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Seattle Times and a few other major papers. Few of them are full-time staff employees. Free lance contributors who once covered live jazz and reviewed recordings regularly show up in print less and less often. Call it the Heckman phenomenon.

Until recently, Don Heckman, the jazz critic of The Los Angeles Times, wrote fairly often about jazz in and around the second largest city in the United States. At the beginning of his career at the Times, Heckman worked in tandem with Leonard Feather to provide readers with some of the most complete daily jazz coverage in the world. Like Feather, he was never a staff member. After Feather died in 1994 Heckman, an experienced musician, careful listener and talented writer, became the Times’ chief jazz contributor. He still is, but the contributions are declining to the point of disappearance. Around the turn of the century, jazz coverage was put under the supervision of the Pop Music editor at the Times. What eventually happened is typical of the fate of jazz coverage at most American newspapers. Here is a little of what Heckman wrote recently on his blog about the current situation.

Several months ago, a new editor took over the reins of the Pop Music department from the acting editor. I was told, almost immediately, by her that jazz reviews would be reduced in number, and would essentially have to be pitched to her for approval That represented an immediate and significant change, since — as one who is deeply aware of developments in jazz, here and elsewhere — I had generally done my own scheduling of reviews, with oversight from the acting editor. In addition, the Sunday jazz record review spotlight disappeared.

In scheduling my reviews — of both live concerts and recordings — I tried to balance the major name programs with as much coverage as possible for the Southland’s huge array of world class jazz talent. That approach became virtually impossible when the reviews were cut back to one a week. Within a month or two, they were cut to one every ten days. After that it became a matter of submitting events I thought were important, and hoping that coverage would be permitted. It usually wasn’t.

About two or more months ago, I was advised that the free lance budget for Pop had run out for the year, and that I should contact my editor in late December to consider what could be covered when the new budget came into effect in January. Basically that meant that I could do no reviews for the last 3 1/2 months of the year.

Considering the concentration and frequency of jazz in Los Angeles and Orange counties, that dictum is an absurdity, but L.A. is far from the only place where jazz coverage is drying up. To see all of Heckman’s posting and learn what besides music he heard when he covered the recent Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition, go here.

Not by the way, Mr. Heckman is devoting a substantial share of his time, energy and perceptiveness to a web log. That decision seems somehow familiar. I am adding a link to Here, There and Everywhere under Other Places in the center column.  

How is the jazz coverage in your newspaper? Use the comment link below to reply. In your brief paragraph describing the situation, please include the names of your city and your paper.

Herb Geller is eighty years old today. The alto saxophonist was the performing guest of honor tonight in a tribute concert by the NDR (North German Radio) Big Band. From 1965 to 1993,
Geller was a star soloist of the NDR, one of the best large jazz aggregations in the world. The concert was in the NDR’s venerable Rolf Liebermann studio. Since his mandatory retirement at sixty-five, Geller has been at least as busy as he was during the previous forty-seven years of his career. One of the major post-Charlie Parker alto soloists, he plays frequently in Europe and the United States. His most recent CD is Herb Geller At The Movies (Hep). His latest video is this one:

This video is one of three on You Tube showing Geller in 1972 rehearsing for a concert with the Bill Evans Trio in Germany. In it, he plays piccolo and flute. In the second video, he plays alto sax and flute and continues in this conclusion of the rehearsal sequence. Together, the three clips give us twenty-five minutes of four of the leading jazz players of their time preparing their music. These videos provide a precious opportunity to see Evans at once serious and relaxed in collaboration with a peer for whom he obviously had great respect.

Happy Birthday, Herb. Long may you wave.

There is little or no mention of it in his obituaries, but Studs Terkel’s first book was about jazz. The oral historian, broadcaster and master interviewer died yesterday in Chicago at ninety-six. Terkel won the Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling 1985 book The Good War: An Oral History Of World War II. Many of his other oral history books were also best sellers, beginning in 1967 with Division Street: America. He followed with Hard Times, Working and seven other books.

Even as he was acting in plays and doing his daily radio program, Terkel wrote a jazz column in a Chicago paper. He knew jazz in a wide range. His love and knowledge of it are plain in Giants of Jazz, published in 1957 when he was forty-five years old. The current running through the book is common to all of Terkel’s work, the convictions that everything is part of everything else, that we’re all in this together, that everyone’s story is important. Giants of Jazz begins with King Oliver and concludes with the chapter called “John Coltrane, the Search Continues.” Ending with Coltrane, Terkel reflected his awareness of what was brewing in jazz — Coltrane was slightly known when Terkel wrote the book in 1956 — and his vision of the direction in which the music was headed. Thomas Conner, music editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, captured that aspect of the book in a column in October of 2006.

For example, the chapter on Louis Armstrong is sandwiched between the one about King Oliver (who mentored young Louis) and Bessie Smith (who was affected by the sound of Louis’ horn); Smith’s bio mentions the moment Bix Beiderbecke heard her sing, a moment that left him in awe — and which figures into his own chapter, the next one. These links build a chain throughout the book — mashing up with full force when Count Basie and Charlie Parker hit Kansas City, and then when Dizzy Gillespie meets Bird — and they leave the impression that, yes, each individual was a formidable talent but, no, the opportunity for that talent to succeed did not present itself in a vacuum. These musicians were a part of something greater than themselves, and their own personalities amplified the human race as a whole. It’s all part of a continuity.

To read all of Conner’s column, go here.

Terkel spent 45 years broadcasting a daily hour of conversation, music and commentary on Chicago’s WFMT. In 1980, he won a Peabody award for that work. Among the staff of the station, who admired his defiantly casual dress, his dedication and his irascibility, he had a special name: Free Spirit.

The headline on Terkel’s obit in his hometown paper, The Chicago Tribune, is simply, STUDS. To read the obituary, go here. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, get the flavor of Terkel and his opinions by watching this video.  

Not all of the campaigning this month is political. It is not unusual at this time of year to receive from recording musicians suggestions that they be nominated for awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. As part of his quest to win a Grammy nomination, the British film composer, band leader and saxophonist John Altman sent the following message:

I’m really disappointed. My new CD, The Jazz Soul Of Paris Hilton, has not been nominated for a Grammy. The followup to my brilliant CD Britney Spears: The Jazz Years, it has garnered rave reviews in the jazz press and received NOT ONE vote in this year’s Grammy build-up. I worked closely with Paris herself, assembling an all-star aggregation of jazz talent to interpret the Abdullah Ibrahim/Boney James-inspired compositions of the reality TV star and all around credit to society. For the talented Ms. Hilton’s understanding of social issues, I’m especially proud of “I Come From Barack Obama with a Banjo On My Knee.”  It is reminiscent of Max Roach’s Freedom Suite. Accompanied by an all-star aggregation, Paris H, guest rappers Jay Z, Jazzy B and fiery jazz virtuoso sax man Kenny G deliver an astonishing piece of jazz social commentary.

The incredible handpicked lineup of jazz stars includes Herbie Hancock on clavinet, Woody Allen on clarinet and Wynton Marsalis on the internet. Possibly one of the best rhythm sections ever assembled in the history of jazz recording — George Segal on banjo, bass virtuoso Charlie Haden on banjo, Marcus Miller showing his versatility on banjo, and Diana Krall and Elvis Costello sharing drum duties — shows why jazz is still a living art form appreciated by millions all over the world.

Other guest appearances include Cuthbert Marsalis, the least known member of the jazz dynasty, probably because he is an English aristocrat who does not play any musical instruments and did not invent jazz in 1980; legendary godfather of smooth jazz and easy listening Cecil Taylor; Michael Bublé crooning the all-time favourite “I Never Heard of Mel Tormé;” and James Carter playing “Salt Peanuts.” Oops. That should read Jimmy Carter, reprising the famous White House duet with Dizzy Gillespie that defined his jazz credentials.

Some of the critical raves:

“I laughed till I cried” — Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times

“What a load of rubbish” — Nat Hentoff

“Is this man serious?”– Brick Wahl, LA Weekly

“Brilliant!!!” – Stanley Crouch New York Times

“My personal iPod favourite” — George W Bush

Please, everyone, vote for me in category 10,996 of this year’s Grammys — Best Jazz and Hip Hop Album By a Country Smooth-jazz Crossover Artist Not in the English Language. I promise not to write again until the Emmys are upon us. I will be soliciting votes for my two reality shows — Newsreading With The Stars, where professional ballroom dancers learn to play pro football and read the news, and America’s Idle, where no one has a job any more due to the bizarre global economic policies of the last 8 years.

A couple of years ago, Mr. Altman visited the west coast of the United States and performed without tongue in cheek at the helm of a big band. He is the curved soprano saxophone soloist out front in this video. The tune is “Love Is Here To Stay.” I think I glimpse Jerry Pinter and Lanny Morgan in the sax section and Andy Martin among the trombones. The others, including the man strolling through the background with a telephone to his ear, are unidentifed. How could he hear?