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Sometimes I get buried in deadline work and through neglect or “a kind of monumental inefficiency” (to borrow a favorite Paul Desmondism), I let a day or two go by without putting something new on Rifftides. Then, it gets to be ‘round midnight and it occurs to me that I have committed what my blog guru long ago said was the ultimate weblog goof—dead air, white space, or whatever it’s called on the internet. So, not having the foresight to stockpile shelf pieces, I flail about looking for inspiration in hopes of finding something that will preserve the integrity of the operation or, at least, be entertaining.

“Whoa!” as Burma Jones (speaking of monumental inefficiency) often said, look who came to the rescue this time: Lester Perkins, the proprietor of Jazz on the Tube. His latest video borrowed from YouTube features Erroll Garner in the BBC studios in London in 1964. So, I’m borrowing from Lester’s borrowing.

Launching into a song and taking his sweet time about it, Erroll indulges in one of his favorite pastimes, keeping his sidemen guessing. Notice the bassist, Eddie Calhoun, as he and drummer Kelly Martin remain at the ready while the boss goes exploring. Eventually, Garner lets them in on the plan and, ultimately, finds his inner Fats Waller.

Whoa!

Rifftides readers in the New York metropolitan area, or planning to visit it, may care to make note of an unusual performance coming up this week. Soprano saxophonist Bill Kirchner, pianist Marc Copland and vocalist Carol Fredette will make a rare collaborative appearance on Wednesday evening, April 17, at The Players. Ordinarily, the private club on Gramercy Park South is open only to members, but membership is not required for this occasion. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, co-sponsor of the event, posted comments about the musicians:

Jazz at the Players

“Bill Kirchner is one of those rare musicians who is able to synthesize an awareness of the past with his own voice, taking jazz in new directions that are firmly based on tradition.”—Benny Carter

“Carol Fredette is everything you need in a jazz singer. She thinks, swings and phrases like a creative instrumentalist, yet her way with words captures the essence of a lyric.”—Dan Morgenstern, author, jazz historian, critic

On Marc Copland “A quiet giant of his instrument…the stuff of legend.”—All About Jazz.com

To my knowledge, no recording exists of Kirchner, Fredette and Copland together. Perhaps one will materialize from the Players gig. In the meantime, here’s Copland with a solo version of Don Sebesky’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” from the pianist’s album Time Within Time.

Rifftides reader Svetlana Ilyicheva (pictured) now and then sends reports about concerts she attends in Moscow—Russia, not Idaho. Here is her account of a recent performance by visiting American musicians.

A few days ago (April 3) I was at the concert given by the Dave Liebman Quartet at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. It was organized with the aid of the US embassy. That vast hall is filled to the brim only on rare occasions, but there were quite a lot of people. I believe that goes to show that American jazz is quite popular here. The group produced a very pleasant impression on the public and was accepted warmly.

I liked the manner in which Vic Juris plays the guitar; classic, noble and delicate, not “pushing” but very clear. The drummer Marco Marcinko happened learned to play drums from Joe Morello, which won my favour immediately. An emotional solo by the bassist Tony Marino gained him a very hearty applause.

As to Dave Liebman himself, the sound of his saxes (soprano and tenor), pleasant to the ear, seemed to me distinctive and characteristic only of him. I enjoyed his solos and a very attractive specific gesture he made when the other members of the group played or performed solos to his satisfaction (see the black and white photo).

Quite interesting original pieces alternated with jazz classics. Most of all, I liked their performance of “Star Dust” with a long a capella introduction by Vic Juris (this piece of music is “an oldie but goodie”) and, especially, “Lonely Woman.” I at once recollected the unforgettable Modern Jazz Quartet performance of this piece. The Liebman group appeared to be perfectly coordinated, the members playing high quality music individually and collectively.

Vladimir Feiertag of St. Petersburg, a renowned expert on jazz, emceed the concert. Pavel Korbut was taking photos. With his permission, we see a couple of them here.

—Svetlana Ilyicheva

A few years ago Liebman, pianist Richie Beirach, bassist Ron McClure and drummer Billy Hart revived their group Quest, which thrived in the 1980s. In a new CD, Circular Dreaming, they concentrate on pieces played by the Wayne Shorter-Herbie Hancock-Ron Carter-Tony Williams edition of the Miles Davis Quintet, plus new compositions by Liebman and Beirach. —DR

Steve Coleman, Functional Arrhythmias (Pi)

For more than 30 years, Coleman has been a leader in music on the forward edge of jazz. This album synthesizes and focuses concepts that the alto saxophonist and composer developed through the M-Base movement he founded in the 1980s. The philosophical and metaphysical aspects of M-Base may never have been clearly explained, but there is nothing unclear about this music. Its crispness, directness and compelling movement are expressed in 14 concise miniatures. Coleman says that his inspiration for the music is the human body as it goes about its business of breathing, thinking, pumping blood and managing hormones and lymph functions. It is music that reflects life. The musicians are Coleman, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, bassist Anthony Tidd, drummer Sean Rickman and—on some tracks—guitarist Miles Okazaki. They manage to sound at once spontaneous and rigorously rehearsed. There are moments reminiscent of some of Igor Stravinsky’s chamber music (notably in “Medulla-Vagus), of early Ornette Coleman (no relation), and of pieces by Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers and Jimmy Giuffre in their 1954 recording The Three. However interesting, those similarities are tangential. This Coleman album is packed with original, provocative and important music.

(For thoughts by Coleman and others about his music, see this recent article by Larry Blumenfeld.)

 

Duke Ellington, The Duke At Fargo 1940: Special 60th Anniversary Edition (Storyville)

The Vintage Jazz Classics 1990 release of this milestone recording is disappearing. Storyville’s 2000 reissue was a welcome effort to keep the occasion alive. Apparently, the two-CD set will remain available. Ellington’s 1940-’41 band was his best from several standpoints. Customarily called by critics and historians the Blanton-Webster band, it found Ellington at a peak of composing and orchestrating creativity for a band of young stars that included bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. He also had Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Rex Stewart, the newly recruited Ray Nance, Barney Bigard, Ivie Anderson, Herb Jeffries and the whole remarkable crew that make hearing the band one of the most satisfying experiences in modern music. Ellington was touring in the Midwest. The one-nighters included a dance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. Some of the music was broadcast live. To the benefit of posterity, young radio engineer Jack Towers recorded all of it with three microphones and a disc recorder. Towers captured the verve and cohesion of the band in sound whose quality is remarkable for the time and under the circumstances. Cootie Williams had recently left Ellington to join Benny Goodman, but Stewart, Nance and Wallace Jones had no trouble keeping the trumpet section fires burning. The soloists are at the top of their games, with Hodges and Stewart frequently brilliant. Nonetheless, the evening’s first place honors go to Webster for two choruses of “Star Dust” that have imprinted on the minds of generations of listeners. If for nothing more than that masterpiece, this set is a basic repertoire item. But, of course, there is much more.

For a story about one person’s reaction to the Ellington-Webster “Star Dust,” see this post from the dawn of Rifftides history.

 

Jovino Santos Neto, Piano Masters, Vol 4 (Adventure Music)

Santos Neto alternates between his home in Seattle and his Rio de Janeiro birthplace. In this solo album, he concentrates on his own compositions and pieces by other Brazilians but also plays standards of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and John Lennon. A protégé of the monumentally influential Hermeto Pascoal, Santos Neto excels in the music of his native country and in jazz, showing no evidence in his playing that he finds conceptual differences between them. He follows a reflective “My Funny Valentine” with his “Sempre” as a brief transition to Ary Barroso’s ”Na Batucada da Vida,” creating a luscious medley. “Hoping For the Day,” a ballad supported by rich harmonic transitions, seems ready for a gifted writer of lyrics. Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “One Note Samba” glides and swings on bossa nova rhythms that recall the sense of discovery the Brazilian music excited when it first traveled north. Santos Neto invests Pascoal’s famous baião “Bebê” with the drama that makes it one of the composer’s most beloved pieces. The recording captures the Fazioli concert grand piano with rich fidelity.

 

Mike Longo, A Celebration of Diz and Miles (CAP)

In concert, Longo and his trio in concert alternate pieces associated with the two of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Dizzy Gillespie’s musical director from l966 to 1974, the pianist performs five of the trumpeter’s best-known pieces, “Con Alma,” “Tour de Force,” the blues “Here ‘Tiz,” a sprightly take on the bop standard “Ow” and a sizzling “A Night in Tunisia” in which Longo steadily builds intensity and ends with a virtuoso unaccompanied coda. Three pieces from the Miles Davis repertoire were in the Kind Of Blue album, but Longo comes closest to Davis’s spirit in a gambol through “Milestones” and in his lyrical treatment of “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Bassist Paul West and drummer Ray Mosca are strong in support and impressive in their solo features, notably so in their spots on “Here ‘Tiz.”

 

Kristin Korb, What’s Your Story? (Double K Music)

The bassist and singer Kristin Korb has married and moved from Los Angeles to Copenhagen. She returns to the US now and then, as she did to record this intimate collection. With only Bruce Forman’s guitar and Jeff Hamilton’s drums for accompaniment and no place to seek cover, Korb must “feel all the heat,” to paraphrase part of her ingenious lyric to Jerome Richardson’s “Groove Merchant.” If she feels the heat, it is not evident. What the listener feels is warmth, swing, good humor and compatibility with her colleagues. She and Forman flawlessly recreate the famous saxophone soli section of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis arrangement of the Richardson piece, a feat of unison singing, playing and lyric writing and a joy to hear. Korb’s singing, impressive from the time of her first recording with her mentor Ray Brown, has increased assurance, a knowing use of inflection and flawless intonation in the upper register. Her bass playing is in the Brown tradition; clean, tough, in tune and rhythmically irresistible. Her solo on “Green Dolphin Street” is a high point. In a varied set of songs by Matt Dennis, Mary Lou Williams, Dori Caymmi, Cole Porter and Frank Loesser, she is as convincing in Porter’s 1940s novelty “Don’t Fence Me In” as in Amber Navran’s contemporary “Always Searching For My Baby.” This could be a candidate for vocal album of the year. But, then, there’s that bass playing.

The next few Rifftides posts will be devoted to reviewing—or at least acknowledging—some of the hundreds of recent album arrivals that have given my mailman an aching back and made an obstacle course of the office and music room. My intention is to choose wisely among a bewildering profusion of mostly recent CDs by known, little known and unknown musicians and to keep the reviews reasonably short.

Dawn Upshaw, Maria Schneider: Early Morning Walks (artistShare)

Maria Schneider’s orchestral settings are for nine poems by Ted Kooser and four by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. The glorious American soprano Dawn Upshaw is the singer. The composer-conductor, the soprano and the work of the poets combine in a collection that is neither jazz nor classical but has elements of both. There is no use wasting time attempting to categorize this music.

Kooser (born in 1939) was poet laureate of The United States from 2004 to 2006. Drummond, who died in 1987, is often described as the most influential Brazilian poet of the 20th century. Their poetry uses plain language to tell simple stories saturated with universal meaning. Melding their own disciplines, Schneider and Upshaw interpret the poems to create new art. Whether by design in Schneider’s scores or by spontaneous inspiration, Upshaw uses repetition and variations on phrasing to create the feeling of improvisation. For example, here is Kooser’s “Walking by Flashlight.”

Walking by flashlight
at six in the morning,

my circle of light on the gravel

swinging side to side,
coyote, raccoon, field mouse, sparrow,
each watching from darkness

this man with the moon on a leash.

Upshaw enhances the fourth line’s rhythmic feeling by singing:

…”my circle of light on the gravel
swinging, swinging, swinging, swinging, swinging
side to side…”

In her orchestration of the piece, Schneider opens the score for improvised soloing by pianist Frank Kimbrough and obbligatos by clarinetist Scott Robinson and bassist Jay Anderson, the only members of Schneider’s orchestra to appear on the album. The subtle magic they achieve is typical of the rewards the album gives close listeners. The Australian Chamber Orchestra plays on the Kooser pieces, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra on the Drummond.

Schneider prefaces the Drummond poems/songs with her composition “Prologue,” which Upshaw vocalizes wordlessly. Upshaw’s singing and Schneider’s writing for the orchestra create an effect not unlike that of Heitor Villa Lobos’s “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” although Schneider does not borrow from Villa Lobos. Her penchant for Brazilian music is evident as an undercurrent in the Drummond pieces, which she fashions as a suite. Her Brazilianism brings dramatic enhancement to the mélange of emotions in “Don’t Kill Yourself.” The music underlines and intensifies the poet’s celebrated amalgam of elegance and satirical humor:

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t Kill Yourself.
Save all of yourself for the wedding
though nobody knows where or if
it will ever come.

The delicacy, strength, surprise and rhythmic punch of Schneider’s writing for that stanza is a high point of the album. Upshaw’s evocative ability with lyrics provides others. When she sings “moon,” you see the moon. The inflection and color she gives “earthy,” makes you understand something about the Carlos of “Don’t Kill Yourself.”

This is not music that you’re likely to play at your next party, unless you invite no one but quiet listeners. It is one with which to sit alone and have before you the Kooser and Drummond poems in the booklets that come with this beautifully packaged CD.

David Weiss & Point Of Departure, Venture Inward (Positone)
The Cookers, Believe (Motéma)

Trumpeter Weiss is a resourceful leader who forms groups that attract young musicians making a mark in jazz and older players long since established. His Point Of Departure quintet brings together the rising tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, guitarist Nir Felder, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Jamire Williams. The band builds on the tradition of Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and other mainstream figures while edging into avant garde territory. Their repertoire here includes pieces by Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Tony Williams and Charles Moore. Thirty-odd years ago, Moore wrote intriguing compositions for the nearly forgotten Contemporary Jazz Quartet. His “Number 4” stimulates a muscular, dancing solo by Allen and a reflective one by Weiss at his most Milesish. Curtis and Williams move everything along with surging power. Felder is a guitarist to keep your ear on.

Weiss’s septet The Cookers incorporates leading musicians over 50, although alto saxophonist Craig Handy only recently made it into that age group, and Weiss won’t until next year. Pianist George Cables, tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, drummer Billy Hart, trumpeter Eddie Henderson and bassist Cecil McBee are veterans seasoned by work with Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Art Pepper, Joe Henderson and Max Roach, to name a few of the leaders who have employed these all-stars. Harper is formidable in solo on the opening “Believe.” Indeed, each of the soloists is consistently impressive. The ensemble is a wall of sound in Wayne Shorter’s “Free For All,” which is remarkable for Cables’ dancing solo. Weiss’s trumpet playing has developed impressively over the past decade. He more than holds his own with the formidable Henderson.

Small town newspapers sometimes provide surprisingly interesting coverage of world-traveling jazz artists who pass through or live in their communities. For decades, Marvin Stamm and his wife Nancy have been residents of the Westchester County town of North Salem, an hour north of New York City. This week, the North Salem Daily Voice interviewed the trumpeter about why he lives there. This is some of what he said:

I tell people in my travels about our town, but they find it difficult to believe that I live in such a quiet space, affording reflection and renewal, while being so close to one of the largest cities in the world. . . I always look forward to coming home. I never tire of the reservoir, the hills and the woodlands. . .

To read all of the interview with Stamm, go here.

Pianist George Cables talked with the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, way out west where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific. He told about what he learned from Art Tatum, his favorite instrument other than the piano, and what it was like when he and alto saxophonist Frank Morgan played for prisoners.

We went to San Quentin and played. If you think being there locked-up is life-changing … being there a matter of hours is life-changing. You get to meet some of the people. Alto player Grace Kelly came with us and played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and there were tears in the hardened prisoners, an audience full of teary-eyed big guys that were locked up.

You’ll find all of the Cables story here.

Here’s a followup to the Sarah Vaughan birthday post of March 27. In his Crown Propeller’s Blog, Armin Büttner published a picture of the great singer in interesting company at the Crown Propeller Lounge in Chicago. The club thrived as one of the city’s most vital nightspots from the late 1940s through the 1950s. It specialized in jazz and R&B and booked some of the leading lights in both fields. Here we see world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis with Sarah and trumpeter King Kolax. Crown Propeller owner Norman Schlossberg is behind Louis and Vaughan.

Armin has not yet identified the women on either end. If you know who they are, send a comment and I’ll pass it along to Mr. Büttner. Go here to visit his fascinating blog, see other photos from the Crown Propeller’s heyday and hear music of the period, including a track by Kolax’s excellent little band. Thanks to Armin and the Schlossberg family for permission to use the picture.

The next logical step is to listen to Sarah in a recording from the same era. We might as well wrap our spring theme into this exercise in nostalgia and musicality. The trumpet player who introduces the piece is Miles Davis, a week before his 24th birthday. The rhythm section is Jimmy Jones, piano; Billy Taylor, bass; and J.C. Heard, drums. The clarinetist who joins at the end is Tony Scott. This was May 19, 1950.

All eight of Sarah’s sides with the George Treadwell All-Stars are in this box set of four CDs. In addition to the musicians you heard on “It Might as Well be Spring,” the band included guitarist Mundell Lowe, trombonist Bennie Green and saxophonist Budd Johnson.

We are back from vacation, and look what sprang while we were gone. We’ll have apricots.

There is regrouping, listening, reading and blogging to do. Stay tuned. But, how do we live up to that headline? Ah…of course; Stan Getz, Lou Levy, Monty Budwig and Victor Lewis, 1981.

I was saddened to learn this morning of the passing of Anthony Lewis, the New York Times columnist and, earlier in his career, nonpareil Supreme Court reporter. Lewis had a nearly unmatched ability to make complex issues clear and understandable. He set standards. For a comprehensive obituary and review of his life, see this Times article.

Journalist, trombonist and bandleader Eric Felten continues his multifaceted ways. He has added internet television to his repertoire, presenting, interviewing and sometimes sitting in with prominent jazz artists. His latest Wall Sreet Journal op-ed piece recalls how a tax rule now nearly forgotten had a dramatic effect on popular music and the evolution of jazz. It begins:

These are strange days, when we are told both that tax incentives can transform technologies yet higher taxes will not drag down the economy. So which is it? Do taxes change behavior or not? Of course they do, but often in ways that policy hands never anticipate, let alone intend. Consider, for example, how federal taxes hobbled Swing music and gave birth to bebop.

To read Felten’s full story of the cabaret tax that kicked in near the end of the second world war, go here.

The Voice of America is best known for its shortwave radio broadcasts overseas. But the VOA is also active on the worldwide web with, among other things, its Music Alley webcasts. Felten hosts Beyond Category, a series of half-hour visits with jazz musicians who live in or visit Washington, DC, his home base. Recent guests have included Larry Willis, Donny McCaslin, Tia Fuller, Eldar Djangirov and Gary Smulyan. His latest subjects are pianist Bill Mays and bassist Tommy Cecil. Here is the entire segment.

For links to previous episodes of Beyond Category or to see the Mays-Cecil segment again, go here.

No sooner do I review the new Ian Carey album (see the previous exhibit) than “Nemuri Kyoshirō” pops up on YouTube with moving pictures of another installment of that Evan Francis (tenor sax)-Kasey Knudsen(alto sax) blues chase and fresh solos by Carey and pianist Adam Shulman. We get a bonus (?)—occasional shots out the window of Oakland at night.

If you are wondering about the name of that tune, Nemuri Kyoshirō is the hero of a series of novels by Renzaburo Shibata. He is described as, “a sleepy-eyed outlaw swordsman, the son of a Japanese mother and a foreign father, who was conceived during a Black Mass.

It’s time to catch up with a few of the CDs that make their way into my house from what is often described, puzzlingly, as the dying jazz scene. If jazz is dying, the people recording and distributing all this music haven’t noticed. Hey, at least I got the piles of recordings off the floor. Now they’re in cardboard boxes and a wicker basket crowding one another off the coffee table in the music room, and there’s no room for a coffee cup.

Ian Carey Quintet + 1, Roads & Codes (Kabocha)

Carey writes lines that flow on astringent harmonies. His trumpet and flugelhorn keep the listener’s attention not through volume, velocity and extended sorties into the stratosphere, but with story telling and a burnished tone. Kasey Knudsen, the +1 of the band’s new name, spells Evan Francis on alto saxophone, leaving Francis to concentrate on tenor sax and flute. With the audacity of her conception and sound, Knudsen is a stimulant. The series of blues choruses and phrases that she and Francis exchange on “Nemuri Kyoshirō” is an album high point. The three-horn front line expands Carey’s arranging palette beyond that of his 2010 CD Contextualizin’, allowing richer ensembles and deeper voicings in figures behind soloists. Pianist Adam Shulman, bassist Fred Randolph and drummer Jon Arkin constitute one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s finest rhythm sections. Carey acknowledges that nearly half of his compositions are under the influence of his heroes Charles Ives (“West London”), Igor Stravinksy (“Andante”), John Coltrane (“Count Up”) and Neil Young (“Dead Man [Theme]”). The influences are points of departure for the individualism of Carey’s writing.

Carey is a commercial artist whose graphics company shares the name of his record label, Kabocha. He created the CD’s package. The digipak features comic strip art that wryly describes the frustration in sending yet another album into the flood of new releases. Here is one panel.

I don’t know what it means, either. I’ll take the CD with me on my next trip to New York and see if the music sounds as good there as it does in the west.

Charles Mingus: The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65 (Mosaic)

For half a century, remnants of the electrifying music that Mingus made with his mid-1960s quintet and sextet have shown up in a jumble of LPs, CDs, cassettes and DVDs. The music is sublime, but the quality of reproduction was often abysmal, and many of the recordings quickly became impossible to find. Now, Mosaic, the National Archives of jazz record companies, brings together 38 performances by the bassist and a collection of sidemen that included some whose power and influence were as nearly great as their leader’s.

Four of the discs have trumpeter Johnny Coles, alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and the rhythm section of Mingus, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Dannie Richmond. They present the April 4, 1964 Town Hall concert in New York that preceded the sextet’s European tour and a concert six days later at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. As I wrote in a 2007 Rifftides piece about this band, “Dolphy the incredible flutist (and saxophonist and bass clarinetist) was a primary source of Mingus’s satisfaction, but far from the only one. This was a unit attuned and interlocked, every soloist in his creative prime, the band’s power and responsiveness at a peak.”

The set begins with relative calm, Byard’s stunning solo tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller, then a Mingus bass solo on “Sophisticated Lady” before the sextet uncorks its power in “So Long Eric.” The piece was titled in recognition of Dolphy’s plan to stay in Europe at the end of tour. That power, even in the ballads, rarely subsides through nearly four hours of concert performances.

Dolphy (pictured right) did leave the the band at the end of the tour and within weeks was dead in Germany following an episode of diabetic shock. Mingus went into depression. He recovered, and although his career had further periods of distinction through the sixties and seventies, none of his bands, large or small, reached the heights of this sextet.

Nonetheless, the reorganized sextet with trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer and saxophonists Charles McPherson and John Handy in for Coles, Dolphy and Jordan, was formidable by comparison with nearly any other small band of the day. Their performances at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis are top flight. When Mingus doubles the size of the group at Monterey with the addition of six premier west coast musicians for “Meditations on Integration,” the band reaches a level of excitement that inspires an extended ovation from the festival audience.

Even without its five tracks of previously unissued music, this set would have been important. With them, it is indispensable.

Duke Ellington: Newport 1958 (Mosaic Singles)

Columbia Records’ LP, and its later CD allegedly of Ellington’s ’58 Newport appearance, was a deception. Eight of the ten tracks were not recorded at the festival but later in a studio. Columbia tacked on real introductions from Peabody Park and mixed in festival applause and crowd noise. Such foolery was not uncommon in the ’50s and ‘60s. The results were nearly always obvious. In this case, the music was so good that generations of listeners put up with the fakery. Mosaic reissues the studio tracks identified, unadulterated and with sound improved through remastering. To those eight pieces, plus “Just Scratchin’ the Surface” and “Happy Reunion” they add four other tracks recorded at the festival but never before issued.

So much for the backstory. The late-period Ellington band is in fine shape, sounding happy. There are superior solos by Johnny Hodges, Clark Terry, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves, Shorty Baker, Ray Nance, Russell Procope, Cat Anderson and Sam Woodyard. This version of “El Gato” has one of the most gripping four-trumpet chase sequences ever recorded, Hodges’ work on “Multicolored Blue” can inspire deep sighs, and the stylistic spoofery in “Jazz Festival Jazz” is great fun. It’s good to have this album cleaned up, expanded and reclaimed.

The Brubeck Institute Festival—underway since Monday—gets into full swing tonight in Stockton, California, with a concert by the Tom Harrell Quintet. Other major musicians involved include The Brubeck Brothers Quartet, Gunther Schuller, Wynton Marsalis and Joe Gilman. Paul Conley reports about the festival for Capital Public Radio and KXJZ in Sacramento. To hear Paul’s story about the first major Brubeck Institute event since Dave’s death in December, click here.

For a compete festival schedule, go here.

…it’s another; in this case that pesky gremlin. Rifftides finally banished him after two weeks of intermittent computer attacks, so he moved on to disrupt power to the western data center that provides the energy artsjournal.com blogs need to get on the internet. Rifftides was out of business for several hours today and inaccessible to thousands of readers. The hosts have it fixed. (Fingers crossed.)

Most of my thinking about gremlins lately has been confined to cursing them, but it occurred to me that there might be gremlin music. Sure enough, there is. It’s by the prolific film composer Jerry Goldsmith for a movie called—what else?—Gremlins. Here, a suite from the score is played by the Tenerife (Spain) Film Orchestra, conducted by Mark Snow.

It turns out that since 2007 Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, has hosted an important film festival.

Twitter and I are not strangers, but I recognize the addictive potential of tweeting and try not to get hooked. Still, occasional Rifftides announcements via Twitter turn up followers whom I, in turn, follow. A new one is Ken Pickering, the artistic director of the Vancouver, Canada, Jazz Festival. He liked an item he found in the archive and tweeted about it. It was from this blog’s Neolithic era, about the late composer, arranger and bandleader Rod Levitt.

Mr. Pickering’s tweet reminded me how much I miss Levitt and how jazz now could use his rare combination of solid musicianship, adventurousness and wit. Levitt’s recorded work is increasingly hard to find. Here is that piece, revised slightly and illustrated.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

From January 15, 2007

Rifftides reader Russell Chase writes:

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1933 movie 42nd Street on TV. I promised myself that I would listen to Rod Levitt’s LP with the same title today. I wound up playing all of the four Levitt LPs that I have. They have always rated very highly among my favorite things. Such consistently interesting writing and fine playing over a span of four LPs is hard to match.
When your name popped out of the notes of the Insight album, you were immediately nominated as the person with whom I would share my elation at having a non-CD day, and the reason why.

Well, Mr. Chase, now you have shared your elation with all of us, and that’s good; Levitt’s music deserves recognition. Rod Levitt played trombone in the Dizzy Gillespie big band that that toured Latin America and the Middle East in 1956, and in Gil Evans’ orchestra. For a time, he made a dependable living in the orchestra of the Radio City Music Hall. But he had a compulsion to write music, and in the early 1960s, he began turning out ingenious arrangements for an eight-piece rehearsal band. Levitt made use of audacious harmonies and spacious voicings, and many of his horn players doubled instruments, so that the octet often sounded twice its size. He adored Duke Ellington, and reflected Ellington’s influence. Yet, without embracing free jazz, he also managed to impart a rambunctious feeling of abandon, and Down Beat included him in a survey article about nonconformist composers. All of the other subjects of the piece were card-carrying members of the avant garde. I remember Levitt’s being amused, if surprised, by the company in which the magazine put him.

Over three or four years in the mid-sixties, he turned out the four albums Russ Chase mentions. They comprise a body of recordings that are fresh, evocative and enormously entertaining forty years later. The writing was daring, finely crafted and marinated in wit. Most of his players were top studio professionals who were superb improvisers. Among them were the trumpeters Rolf Ericson and Bill Berry, the pianist Sy Johnson and the saxophonists Buzz Renn and Gene Allen. Levitt’s gutsy, often raucous trombone was at the center of many arrangements, but he also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. None of Levitt’s three RCA Victor albums has been reissued on CD. Five tracks made it onto a 1988 RCA compilation CD with other works by Hal McKusick and John Carisi. The disc is difficult to track down. Amazon continues to list it, but as “currently unavailable.” Trolling the web may now and then turn up vinyl copies of Insight and Solid Ground, but 42nd Street seems to have evaporated.

For the most part, the demand by a modest-sized core of listeners for reissue of Levitt’s albums has fallen on deaf ears (also known as recording company accounting departments), but there is a happy exception. Before his company sold itself to Concord Records, Ralph Kaffel, the president of Fantasy, Inc., succumbed to years of entreaties from pesky critics and reissued Levitt’s first album on Riverside as a CD in the OJC series. That was 1963’s Dynamic Sound Patterns. In his 2003 National Public Radio review of the CD, Kevin Whitehead said, “He liked blaring harmonies and primary colors,” and that’s true, but Levitt also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. He knew how to use space. He was a master of balance among the sections and a creator of droll surprises. The enthusiastic cadre of admirers he accumulated with those LPs wasn’t big enough to earn him a renewal with RCA. Now that the Victor catalogue has been absorbed into the massive Sony empire, chances of the Levitts being reissued seem small. By the early seventies, possibly discouraged but a cheerful realist, Levitt began making a living writing music for advertising and turned out some of the hippest background music ever to grace TV commercials in New York. He kept the octet going as a rehearsal group, playing occasional concerts and, sometimes, simply hiring musicians to play his charts for fun. He also played for a time in the 1970s in Chuck Israels’ National Jazz Ensemble, a pioneer jazz repertory orchestra. For the NJE, he expanded the arrangement of “His Masters Voice,” Levitt’s evocative tribute to Duke Ellington. Happily, it is available in a splendid reissue CD on the Chiaroscuro label. For the past several years, Rod Levitt has been living in Vermont, largely inactive in music.

A sidebar to the story: When I was anchoring and reporting television news in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-sixties, I was addicted to Dynamic Sound Patterns. Levitt came to his hometown to visit his parents, I invited him to be a guest on a series I put together, a hybrid documentary and discussion program. It was called Insight. I told Levitt the broadcast needed theme music and asked, with trepidation, what it would cost to commission him to write it. He named what I thought was a reasonable figure. The program manager approved the deal. When Levitt got back to New York, he wrote the music, recorded it with his octet, notified me that it was ready and sent an invoice. The management reneged. They wouldn’t pay the bill. I was angry and embarrassed. When I told Levitt, he said not to worry, he would make use of the music. It became the title tune of his next album. In the liner notes, he mentioned me and the station, kindly. That’s class.

The piece stands alone, but it was also perfect for its intended use. In the unlikely event that I ever go back into television, I’ll do a documentary series, call it Insight, use that music and see that Rod gets paid for it.
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Rod Levitt died less than six months following this post, on May 8, 2007.