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In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades…

…because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could go into all of my wild dreams.

…and why he rarely works with pianists.

At the risk of alienating my piano-playing friends — and I’ve played with some great piano
players — the piano is a very dominating instrument. I guess this goes back to when I was 7 years old and I was able to play and get into myself without any other instrument. The jazz bands in New Orleans — you see these guys marching down the street, there’s no piano…

The kind of music without a piano is more gritty, more real, hard jazz. It allows me to feel more free in my improvisations. The piano is very leading. You can lead a band here, you can lead to this chord, this mood. Everything is fed by a piano. I find that very restricting.

For more of the Massimo interview, go here.

For classic examples of Rollins not being led or fed by a piano, listen to A Night At The Village Vanguard and Way Out West, both from 1957 and as fresh as this morning.

The Frishberg, Sullivan, Wellstood item in the next exhibit brought quick responses from two men who knew Wellstood well. The first was Ted O’Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster who produced a few Wellstood recordings.

Wellstood was one of the brightest men I ever met, never mind how great a pianist he was. And great he was, and not afraid to play the way he did: as a stride/swing player in the bop era, and do it so well! (I’ve thought of him as the Ruby Braff of the piano…) I think I made more records with Wellstood at the piano than anyone else — two with reedman Jim Galloway, two solo releases, and Stridemonster, piano duets with Dick Hyman. I’m glad I knew him, and wish he were still around.

Dave Frishberg wrote:

Did you know Wellstood? I did, although our paths crossed only infrequently. In the early ’60s, my wife Stella (whom you met in New Orleans) and I stayed with Kenny Davern for a couple of days in Brielle NJ, where he and Wellstood played on a boat. One morning, Dick and Kenny and I played with gloves, bat and ball on a big athletic field. All three of us threw our arm(s) out. That was the day I got to know Wellstood, watched him play the piano at his cottage.

Wellstood was always one of my idols, although I never tried to play like him. He was a schooled pianist who could play Chopin, Bach, etc. One night I took Ben Webster (who was a piano freak) to hear Wellstood play solo at a jazz club around the corner from the Metropole. Ben was knocked out, gave Wellstood an enthusiastic hug and many shouts of approval. Also in the audience was Louis Armstrong (!) and party, and I was introduced to him twice at his table by both Wellstood and Webster. A memorable evening for me. I think the club was in the 40s between Fifth and Seventh Aves, a jazz club that popped up and soon disappeared.

Dick was a brilliant guy, brilliant like Dick Sudhalter, and undoubtedly among the best writers of all jazz musicians, a humorist on a very high level. You must have that Jazzology 2CD set of The Classic Jazz Quartet, and you probably remember the liner notes that each of those guys wrote: Joe Muranyi, Marty Grosz, Sudhalter, and Wellstood — they all write beautifully. Wellstood’s writing reminds me of Woody Allen and SJ Perelman. By the way, that’s a recording I go back to listen to pretty often. There’s another CD on Arbors of Dick playing solo in Dublin that I think is Wellstood at the top of his game.

Now that Dave asks, yes, I knew Wellstood. We became acquainted through the mail. In the 1960s, he sent me an indignant and very funny post card about my review of one of his records, quoting the offending line. By return mail, I pointed out that he had misread and misquoted the line. He then sent a letter of apology, also funny.

We got together occasionally during my New York years in the first half of the seventies. After the late newscast, I frequently went to Hanratty’s on Second Avenue to hear him. Once, I took Paul Desmond. Desmond was delighted by his playing. Wellstood was surprised and flattered that Desmond came to hear him. Dick came to our table during his breaks. I anticipated scintillating exchanges between two world-class wits, but they just sat there complimenting one another.

During a listening session one afternoon, I played Gerry Mulligan the Wellstood album called Alone. Mulligan was impressed by Dick’s composition “Dollar Dance” and his playing on it. I suggested that the two of them should record it together. Mulligan liked the idea. So did Dick, and for a while it seemed that they were going solve contract issues and find a way to make a duo album. That was my one venture into musical match-making. The date never happened. I can still hear in my mind how the two of them would have hit if off.

As Frishberg indicated, Wellstood was a gifted pianist who could handle the classics, and jazz up to, through and beyond bebop. He could play anything. He preferred traditional styles.  He was the first stride pianist, maybe the only one, to take on John Coltrane’s modern harmonic obstacle course “Giant Steps.” He recorded it in 1975, when it was still mystifying much of the jazz world. He tore it up. It’s on his CD This Is The One…Dig! 

I’m with Ted O’Reilly. I wish Wellstood were still around.

Dick Wellstood has been on my mind. Maybe it’s because I heard Dave Frishberg play the piano the other night at The Seasons. Frishberg was in concert singing his inimitable songs and accompanying himself, but he opened up plenty of space for piano solos. Before he became famous for performing his songs, Frishberg worked with Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Ben Webster, Jack Sheldon and Carmen McRae, among other demanding leaders. He was, and is, a versatile and idiosyncratic pianist who wraps several jazz eras into a style of his own. A couple of times on Saturday night, he pulled off stride passages that Wellstood would have appreciated.

In the mid-1940s when Wellstood was a young man working toward a career as a pianist, he was under the spell of Joe Sullivan (pictured). Sullivan (1906-1971) came from Chicago and
began recording in 1927. By 1933, he was Bing Crosby’s accompanist and established as one of the brightest of the young pianists influenced by Earl Hines, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. He in turn influenced Wellstood, who had cards printed that read, “Perhaps you can help me to meet Joe Sullivan. My name is Dick Wellstood.” He distributed the cards in musicians’ hangouts. Finally, the cornetist Muggsy Spanier told Wellstood where Sullivan lived. According to clarinetist Kenny Davern’s account of the meeting, quoted in Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, the pianist knocked on Sullivan’s apartment door well after midnight.

Soon this disheveled figure in slippers and a bathrobe comes shuffling through. Joe opens the door and says, “Yeah?” Dick says, “Hi, my name is Dick Wellstood and Muggsy Spanier said to say hello.” And Joe Sullivan said, “Tell Muggsy Spanier to go f___ himself,” and slammed the door right in Dick’s face.

Nonetheless, Wellstood remained a steadfast admirer of Sullivan. Here is one reason, Sullivan’s 1933 recording of “Gin Mill Blues.”

There is little video of Wellstood performing, but this clip from a concert in Germany in 1982, five years before he died, catches him in full stride, concentration and swing.

New: Torben Waldorff, Afterburn (ArtistShare). The Danish guitarist accomodates his early rock leanings to absorption with expansive jazz of the kind that thrives in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and is spreading around the world. Waldorff, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist-organist Sam Yahel are leaders among the articulate standard bearers of the movement. They play off one another with fiery inventiveness and with grace that allows the music to breathe. Bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Jon Wikan are fully immersed in the new sensibility. All of the compositions but one are by Waldorff. The one is Maria Schneider’s “Choro Dancado,” first recorded on her Concert in the Garden CD. The curve of its Brazilian melodic shape and the elegance of its harmonies inspire a superb performance. Waldorff’s chromaticized “Skyliner” (unrelated to the old Charlie Barnet piece) is another high point.

Old: Art Farmer, Modern Art, UA/Blue Note. This 1958 session paired the trumpeter with
tenor saxophonist Benny Golson in what amounted to a preview of their cooperative band The Jazztet. The pianist was Bill Evans in a brilliant sideman appearance before he left Miles Davis and formed his own trio. Art’s twin brother Addison was the bassist, Dave Bailey the drummer. Farmer and Golson had a nearly symbiotic relationship, but it was Evans who inspired Farmer to some of his best playing on record. The pianist’s own solos on “The Touch of Your Lips” and “Like Someone in Love” are masterpieces. The young, developing, McCoy Tyner was the pianist when Golson and Farmer launched The Jazztet in 1959. This CD tantalizes the listener with intimations of the glories that might have flowered in that group if Evans had been aboard. It is one of the most satisfying recordings of the l950s.

In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I’m no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers’s introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the reader along. Two excerpts:

I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what you just played. Then you go on to the next thing and never repeat yourself. After a few years it finally dawned on me that the ear wants to hear something it recognizes, so I started concentrating on the shape of an entire piece, the form, and how it builds to a climax. As a writer, you also want to avoid getting to the climax too soon. If you do, you’ll kill yourself trying to top it in the arrangement. And the result is monotony.

Writing music and arranging never gets easy. I’ve had students ask me, “How long does it take before it gets easy?” I tell them, “Never.” As soon as you get to one point in your development, you’re looking at the next level.

To read the four parts in order, go to JazzWax and scroll down to July 29. Start with part 1 and scroll back up through parts 2, 3, 4 and an addendum.

Long before he won the Thelonious Monk Institute Composers Competition in 2000, Michael Weiss established himself as a pianist. Fresh out of Dallas in his early twenties, he was soon working with Jon Hendricks, Junior Cook, Charles McPherson and Lou Donaldson, among others. He went on to play with Art Farmer, George Coleman, Frank Wess, Slide Hampton, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Following his Village Vanguard debut as a leader in 2006, The New York Times noted that Weiss was “a confident and sparkling presence on piano,” exhibiting “sensitivity and logic, along with crisp control.” 

In The Chicago Tribune, Howard Reich wrote of Weiss, “Even at full tilt, his sound is sleek, his lines lucid, his textures virtually transparent.” The New Yorker reported that his “shrewd writing and arranging skills [are] as clearly in view as his sleek piano work.” Weiss’s longest association was with Johnny Griffin. He played with the tenor saxophonist from 1987 until Griffin’s death last month at the age of eighty. Shortly after Griffin died, Weiss wrote an appreciation and offered it to Rifftides. We are pleased to have it.

 Reminiscing About Johnny Griffin

by Michael Weiss

Johnny Griffin was one of the great personalities and individuals of jazz, and if jazz is supposed to embody anything, it is individuality, together with improvisation and collaboration.  Griffin was one of the very best soloists who could fully express their personality through their instrument. You hear one note and you know that it’s Johnny. Everything that came out of his horn was a magnification of who he is. You don’t even notice his influences anymore. He really played like nobody else.  His phrases were so unpredictable.  He had this way of abruptly lunging at things at any moment, but could also finish the same line with a sweet lyrical melody. Griffin should be remembered not only for his technical virtuosity but for how he used that technique in his overall expression, woven into the fabric of his style.

Long before I played with Johnny I knew all his records with Monk and Jaws very well and had even transcribed a few of his solos. In 1985 I had been working with his drummer Kenny Washington so when Griff’s regular pianist was unable to make a gig, Kenny recommended me and I joined the band shortly after that. We toured every year up to 2001.

Working with Griffin was among the most – if not the most – exhilarating and electrifying experiences I’ve had on the bandstand with any leader. And not just because Johnny liked to play fast tempos. At any tempo there was a level of energy and excitement on the stage that never felt commonplace. Even after I worked hundreds of gigs with Johnny over several years, there was an intensity, focus and energy with each set that was unlike any other group I’ve played with. It was like mental weightlifting. Griffin, a real extrovert, had a lot to express through his horn and was such a commanding presence that he drew the same thing out of you. Having to solo after him night after night I was compelled to make sure my musical statement was meaningful and worthwhile. Accompanying him was also no easy task, but it didn’t take long to realize the best modus operandi was to just stay out of his way. Overall, it was a great training ground to experience that level of seriousness of purpose and integrity on the bandstand.

Griff was fun to be around. He knew how to enjoy life and seemed very comfortable in his own skin. This generally happy demeanor was quite contagious. On the gig, he listened closely to the rhythm section as we worked our stuff out in our solos. He especially delighted in listening to us wrestle through a particular musical idea. During such occasions, I might look up and see Johnny with his eyes aglow and a big smile. He enjoyed the creative struggle and he was along with you for the ride. Playing jazz for him was a positive, joyous experience and he spread that feeling to everyone in the audience. He had the people in the palm of his hand all the time. He was very comfortable on the mic and frequently said some very funny things. But he was deadly serious about musicmaking – on the bandstand there was no nonsense, no messing around.

The Johnny Griffin Quartet was one of the few working bands in jazz that was still touring regularly throughout the 1990s. As performing night after night is the only way a musician can really develop and improve on his craft, I’m grateful to have been able to do exactly that with Johnny Griffin.

To hear Michael Weiss in two of his many collaborations with Griffin, listen to the 1990 CD The Cat and to Griffin’s 2000 quintet album with Steve Grossman. Grossman, also an expatriate American tenor player in France, is an improviser whose zeal and vigor nearly match Griffin’s. 

Not long ago in a Recent Listening in Brief posting, I brushed by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s new CD. Brevity by no means indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the latest recorded work of that remarkable institution. Will Friedwald, the jazz critic of The New York Sun, is another VJO enthusiast. He attended the band’s recent performance at New York’s 92nd Street Y in the summer concert series overseen by pianist Bill Charlap. Here is some of what he wrote about Thad Jones and Jim McNeely:

Fifty years ago, when Jones was playing in Count Basie’s trumpet section, he had a hard time getting the Count to play his music. When he did, Basie felt obliged to “dumb” Jones’s music down — he regarded it as too complex for mainstream audiences, especially for dancers, who essentially wanted everything in foot-patting foxtrot tempo. This, naturally, was a big part of what impelled Jones to launch his own big band (in collaboration with the drummer Mel Lewis).

If Jones’s charts seemed radical in their day, when they’re compared with the more deliberately complex and concert-styled works of Mr. McNeely, they now seem amazingly straightforward and swinging. Not that Jones’s charts were simplistic or lacking in intricacy; as Mr. Charlap pointed out, “Little Pixie” is, on the surface, a basic variation on “I Got Rhythm,” but it’s got as much going on as a Stravinsky ballet.

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

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist whose technical command set standards for his instrument and who refused to compromise his art, died today at his home in the village of Mauprevoir in France. From Ben Ratliff’s obituary of Griffin in today’s New York Times:

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Holland.

At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.

When the man admired as the Little Giant celebrated his eightieth birthday in May, Rifftides posted this retrospective. It includes a CD recommendation and a link to video of Griffin in action.

Lately, I’ve been missing Tom Talbert. I went into the archive to see what Rifftides had to say about him following his death a little more than three years ago. Here is one paragraph of the remembrance:

Tom died on Saturday, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast before West Coast Jazz was a category. His mid-to-late-1940s Los Angeles bands included Lucky Thompson, Dodo Marmarosa, Hal McKusick, Al Killian, Art Pepper, Claude Williamson and other musicians who were or went on to become leading soloists. Talbert’s writing for large ensembles was ingenious and subtle. The best of it, “Is Is Not Is,” as an example, rivaled George Handy’s iconoclastic work for the Boyd Raeburn band. The recordings Talbert made shortly after World War Two sound fresh today. Art Pepper fell in love with Tom’s treatment of “Over the Rainbow” and adopted the song as his signature tune.

To read the whole thing, go here. Then, see what the distinguished critic Larry Kart had to say about Talbert. To read more about Tom Talbert and hear excerpts from the National Public Radio Jazz Profiles program about him, click here.

In a 1995 Jazz Times review of a Sylvia Syms CD, I wrote:

Sylvia Syms had a vibrato like a telephone wire in a breeze. She sometimes slid around both sides of a note before she settled on it. She often added the syllable “uh” to the end of a word (“ridin’ on the moon-uh”). She could pounce on a consonant and ignore the vowel next door. Some of her power notes were pure brass and there were moments when she sounded alarmingly like Carol Channing.

Hey, nobody’s perfect, but to many discerning listeners, musicians and singers, Sylvia Syms was. This live recording has all the reasons: passion, drama, phrasing, interpretation of lyrics, a solid but flexible time sense and the ability to keep an audience in the palm of her hand.

Frank Sinatra admired Syms so much that he conducted an album for her. It has never made it to CD, but the LP is available. Syms was not the British film star of the same name, but in her treatment of songs and in the way she related to her audiences, she was a vocal actress. This 1991 appearance in England gives an idea why Sinatra called her “the world’s greatest saloon singer.” 

 

The year following that performance, Syms died of a heart attack on the bandstand of the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. She was seventy-four.

McFarland

In the course of writing about Gloria Cheng’s new CD (in the next exhibit), I mentioned Gary McFarland’s collaboration with Bill Evans, a basic repertoire item in every serious CD collection of twentieth century music. Bill Kirchner includes it in his survey of a dozen essential tracks from a variety of McFarland’s and others’ recordings. Kirchner’s preamble places in perspective this brilliant musician, called by Gene Lees an adult prodigy, who was taken from us in a senseless bar room prank. To see Bill’s list and comments, go to this page on Ted Gioa’s web site.

 

Claxton

The stock-in-trade of Steve Cerra’s new blog, Jazz Profiles, is cannily-selected pieces about musicians and others in jazz. His lead story at the moment is Scott Timberg’s 1999 article about William Claxton. If you recognize these photographs, you probably know about Bill Claxton. But you may not know as much as you’ll find if you go here.

 

Journalism

I haven’t written as much here recently as I should have about an important Other Matter, journalism. To say that there is upheaval in the profession, craft, calling–whatever it is–doesn’t begin to cover the uncertainty of its transition to the next phase of the business. Ah, business; yes, that’s what it is. Wherever journalism is headed, an essential element is sure to be citizen journalism. What’s that? For a discussion that includes, appropriately, a video definition, see Jay Rosen’s Press Think. Be prepared to follow several important links. Then come back to Rifftides, please.

Warne Marsh & Kenny Drew In Copenhagen (Storyville). Recorded in 1980, Marsh–a tenor sax master of subtlety and liquid imagination–plays in a quartet with Drew, one of the brightest graduates of Bud Powell’s college of bebop piano knowledge. Marsh has a few “oops” moments in note choices, but hearing him think his way out of them is part of the fun. This CD has one of Marsh’s most stimulating explorations of “Star Eyes,” a song that inspired him for decades.

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Monday Night Live At The Village
Vanguard (Planet Arts). In a continuum that started with Thad Jones-Mel Lewis and ran through the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, the VJO carries on a solid tradition of elevated musicianship, unfettered swinging and good, clean fun. Imperishable arrangements by Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely provide extended opportunities for the band’s galaxy of soloists. Among the players are Dick Oatts, Terell Stafford, Scott Wendholt, John Mosca, Rich Perry, Ralph Lalama, Gary Smulyan and McNeely.

Reptet, Chicken Or Beef? (Monktail). The method in their madness is sometimes concealed in over-the-top shenanigans, but there’s plenty of artistry, discipline and technique in this second CD by the Seattle sextet. They meld a wild combination of musical ingredients into tight arrangements that in some of their more structured moments recall the combo writing of Rod Levitt, in others jump bands of the early forties and, in many, nothing but Reptet.

Gloria Cheng, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutoslawski (Telarc). Cheng specializes in music of twentieth and twenty-first
century composers. Her brilliant playing of Witold Lutoslawski’s 1934 sonata discloses his early inspiration in the impressionistic lyricism of Ravel and Debussy, a revelation to me. Steven Stucky’s and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s pieces–written in recent years–in turn show their debts to Lutoslawski. Cheng soars through these demanding compositions with touch, articulation and dynamics that may overcome any resistance you have to contemporary “classical” music. The deftness and feeling she brings to the “Chorale” section of Salonen’s Three Preludes reminded me of something. I dug out The Gary McFarland Orchestra with Special Guest Bill Evans from 1963 and listened to “Night Images.” Sure enought, the moods, if not the styles, of Salonen’s and McFarland’s pieces complement one another perfectly. It’s all music, folks.

For previous entries in this Recent Listening series, go here and here.

Miguel Zenón, Awake (Marsalis Music). In the DownBeat critics poll results announced in the magazine’s August issue, Zenón swept the “Rising Star Alto Saxophone” category and placed sixth among established alto players. That puts him in company with Ornette Coleman, Phil Woods, Lee Konitz, Kenny Garrett and Greg Osby and ahead of the pack of alto players closer to his age. He is thirty. The timing of the release of this remarkable suite just before the voting deadline may have had something to do with his showing, but Zenón registered a large blip on the critics’ radar with his previous CD Jíbaro and his work with David Sánchez, Charlie Haden and the Mingus Big Band, among other groups. Nearly two years ago, when the music on Awake was a work in progress, I raved after hearing much of it in concert.

Gradually, the content of Zenón’s music, the band’s intensity and the passion of the soloing created the awareness that this was chamber music of a high order; captivating chamber music flowing with Latin pulses, lyricism and yearning, fed by jazz sensibility and swing. Zenón’s playing is unlike that of any other young alto saxophonist of whom I am aware. He has the potential to become one of those soloists–not uncommon a couple of generations ago–whom the average listener can recognize after a few notes.

To read the whole thing, click here. I erred then in attributing “Camarón” to the Jíbaro CD. Zenón was developing that beguiling piece for the album that became Awake, along with “Santo,” “Lamamilla,” “3rd Dimension” and “Ulysses in Slow Motion,” which is intriguing for more than its title. They are among Awake‘s ten pieces, which can fairly be called movements because they are parts of a unified whole.

It is an index of Zenón’s ability to conceptualize that in the sixth track he adds three horns to the quartet for several minutes of simultaneous free improvisation and that he incorporates it lucidly into the form and flow of Awake. I should think that Ornette Coleman, avatar of free jazz, would smile on hearing that section. Zenón’s maturing compositional skills are reflected in his scoring for string quartet on two of the pieces. The writing for strings is not grafted onto the music, as it often is in jazz projects. It is organic, like his uses of Latin rhythm patterns in his compositions, and his improvisational methods. When he quotes Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” in the course of his solo on “Camarón,” his wit galvanizes the listener’s attention for a second, then, with a neat harmonic turn, directs it back into the course of the music.

For nearly three years, Zenón’s quartet has included his fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cole, a drummer whose listening reflexes and placement of small, controlled, explosions beneath the improvisations of Zenón, pianist Luis Perdomo and bassist Hans Glawischnig account for much of the music’s vibrancy and energy. It is good to have recorded evidence of Cole’s work with this satisfying band, and good to hear Zenón’s creative growth matching or exceeding his increasing success with audiences…and critics. 

Jo Stafford, a perfect singer, died on Wednesday. She was ninety years old. There will be obituaries this morning in newspapers all over the world. Web sites have them already. Many people who read them will be hearing of her for the first time because in the 1960s, at the top of her game, she walked away from the music business. Tributes to Jo and memories of her showed up today across the internet. My artsjournal colleague Terry Teachout has a fine one, as does Bill Reed. I know of no better line of description about Jo’s singing than this one from Gene Lees in his book Singers and the Song II:

Possibly it was her way of letting a song happen rather than shoving it at you soaked in personal style.

Here’s what Gene had in mind:

…An Explanation:

As recently as the early 1980s, relatively few major labels made jazz records. Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol, United Artists, Warner Bros, Atlantic and Mercury were the big names. Independent companies that specialized in regular jazz releases included Prestige, Savoy, Blue Note, Riverside, Contemporary, Fantasy, Bethlehem, Verve and Commodore. Mode, Dooto, Roost, Dig, Tampa, Debut and dozens of other small labels occasionally produced and released jazz recordings on long-playing vinyl discs.

Those who wrote about jazz could be reasonably confident of keeping up with established artists or those with significant potential because those were the performers in whom record companies were willing to invest. Particularly among the majors, a musician got a contract and studio time only if someone at a label believed that a recording would sell enough copies to produce a profit.

After the advent of compact discs, the technology and economies of scale in CD production rapidly developed to the point where an eighteen-year-old saxophonist could be his own record company. With reasonably good off-the-shelf equipment, a musician could even record at home and come up with an album that would not make your ears hurt–at least not for technical reasons. CDs became cheap to produce and–more important–cheap to reproduce. Musicians pass them around like business cards. Ralph the budding pianist, guitarist or drummer becomes Ralph Records. He produces his own album of twelve original compositions and sends it to every publication, writer, radio station, web site and blogger whose address he can find.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned twenty-two record companies. It would take at least twenty-two pages to list all of today’s labels. Virtually every young musician you heard last night in a club, coffee house, corner bar, church recreation room or your neighbor’s garage has made, is making or is about to make a CD. He or she (there are lots of aspiring young women musicians today) will distribute the disc to those who might write about it or play it on the air or the internet.

To ambitious players and singers, this ease of production and distribution opens vistas of
hope. For critics, reviewers and DJs, it results in floods of promotional CD copies or MP3s that stream into their real or virtual mail boxes. Rising tides of CDs engulf their offices and listening rooms. If they devoted all of their waking hours to listening, they could not hear a tenth of the music pouring in. All of this is not to complain; there are those who think that being awash in free CDs would be heaven.   

It is merely to explain that what follows is an attempt to mention, with brief comments, a few of the CDs that have recently arrived at Rifftides world headquarters–some not so recently. I selected a few of them because the artists seem to me important. I chose some out of curiosity, others by closing my eyes and pointing. I hasten to add that these are, for the most part, professionally produced albums by experienced musicians. The other kind go to the listening room floor…because I’m out of shelf space.

This is the first part of an overview that may go on for a few days along with whatever other items pop up on Rifftides. If the overview doesn’t include your CD, or your favorite eighteen-year-old tenor player’s, please understand that it would be humanly impossible to hear, let alone write about, all the CDs that show up.

 

Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis, Two Men With The Blues (Blue Note). Without pretension, with solid musicianship, the country hero and the jazz lord of Lincoln Center get together in concert. They play and sing lots of blues, but “Stardust” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” steal the honors. Saxophonist Walter Blanding and the young pianist Dan Nimmer deserve equal billing.

Roy Hargrove, Earfood (Emarcy/Groovin’ High). There’s nothing pretentious here, either. The trumpeter leads his quintet through a set that often recalls predecessors like Lee Morgan and Kenny Dorham. This is a working band, tight and unified. Standing out from all the hard bop cooking and soul stirring is Hargrove’s simple, expressive flugelhorn exposition of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low.” What a gifted melodicist he is.

František Uhlíř, Maybe Later (Arta). Three months ago, I wrote that I was looking forward to a new CD by this Czech virtuoso of the double bass. It finally arrived. In addition to his long association with pianist Emil Viklický, Uhlíř leads his own trio. He is brilliant in interaction with the unusual guitarist Darko Jurkovic and drummer Jaromir Helesic and establishes yet again that he is one of the masters of his instrument. This may be hard to find outside of Europe. It is worth a search.

Paul Bley, About Time (Justin Time). More than a half-hour of the CD is devoted to the title
track, which consists of the venerable pianist’s autumnal meditation on “All The Things You Are” or, to put it more accurately, on the song’s harmonic material. It provides a look into Bley’s allusive, sometimes whimsical, and always very musical methods. The shorter piece is Bley rummaging through Sonny Rollins’s “Pent-up House,” retitled for the occasion, “Encore.” Amusing moment: his quote from “I Ain’t Mad at You.”

More next time.

DevraDoWrite reports that Gerald Wiggins died this morning in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-six. Encouraged when he was a youngster by Art Tatum, for decades Wiggins was revered by listeners and musicians–particularly by other pianists. Anyone familiar with his playing could recognize him immediately by his harmonic acuity, touch, use of space and wry turns of phrase. Jimmy Rowles, one of his greatest admirers among fellow pianists, did Wiggins the rare honor of writing the liner notes for one of his albums and said,

Wig is a great natural soloist, besides being a very good accompanist. He doesn’t just play a concert. He uses the approach of telling his story of the song (and sometimes presents it in three or four different ways). And when he hits the rhythm he has perfect time.

In her long obituary, Devra writes:

Wig was always extremely generous in sharing his time and his talents with fellow musicians, especially the younger ones… He loved to share his knowledge with aspiring and seasoned performers alike. Young pros such as pianists Benny Green, Eric Reed, and bassist John Clayton have felt free to call on Wig for advice. Clayton even recommended his bass students to study with Wig, proclaiming him to be “a one-man jazz history lesson.”

To read all of DevraDoWrite‘s Wiggins obit, click here. Wiggins was a favorite accompanist not only of instrumentalists running stylistically from Louis Armstrong to Joe Pass but also of singers including Nat Cole, Dinah Washington, Joe Williams and Helen Humes. With his glasses more often perched atop his head than on his nose and his smile uninterrupted, Wiggins was a frequent presence in Southern California clubs and at jazz concerts and parties.

Concord Records has dropped Gerry Wiggins Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, the 1991 CD that Rowles praised, but it is available here as an MP3 download. In his role as a sideman on this Cal Tjader session from 1956, Wiggins did some of his most relaxed and stimulating playing on record, with Eugene Wright on bass and Bill Douglass on drums. For other Wiggins CDs, go here.

Gerald Wiggins, 1922-2008.

Rifftides reader Ries Niemi reflects on the Slim Gaillard performance in the clip from Hellzapoppin’.

It’s interesting to contrast this with one of the very last Slim Gaillard clips I have seen, in the movie Absolute Beginners, from 1986. Gaillard was in real life what he plays in that movie- one of the midwives of the birth of postmodernism in music.

The novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes, on which the movie is based, is part of a trilogy about the invention of the teenager in England in the 50’s. Which, in a way, is about the invention of postmodernism, about a culture, music included, with multiple threads that simultaneously question and participate in commercial culture. MacInnes’s books show single black hipster immigrants in London, who existed due to the vagaries of late British Empire immigration, education, and labor laws, helping the white teenagers to understand what “cool” is, at which point the white kids, of course, commercialize it in a way the Carribeans and Africans could not. And in the movie, Gaillard is the personification of this older generation of ultra hipsters who leads the way. In real life, of course, he did the same thing–I would argue he is one of the grandfathers of rap music.

The lineage from Slim and Slam’s ironic, insider hipster reworking of the dozens, ranking scat singing and the African-American oral tradition thru hipster “jazz poetry” in the 50’s, to the Last Poets and Gil Scot Heron in the 60’s, and thence to rap is pretty direct. And the irreverance and vocal gymnastics of Gaillard is discernable in one of the other “Godfathers” as well–James Brown.

Whether you like rap or not (me, I find some of it inspired, and most of it drivel, just like all other genres of music) it’s hard to deny the influence Gaillard had on it. Ironic, then, that the song he sings in Absolute Beginners is titled “Selling Out.”

Ries Niemi is an industrial artist. To see his web site, go here.