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Wednesday night’s memorial service for Bob Brookmeyer attracted friends and admirers from many compartments of his productive life. The valve trombonist, composer and arranger—influential in jazz since the early 1950s— died at the age of 81 last December 15. The memorial was at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan, long a site of worship services incorporating jazz, and of events commemorating the music and its makers. The Rifftides staff thanks saxophonist, composer and bandleader David Sherr, who attended the memorial and sent this account.

The program included music and reminiscences by family and long-time friends and associates—speakers and musicians who had known Bob Brookmeyer for years, in at least one instance since he was a teenager.

Featured throughout was the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, with which Brookmeyer had been associated since its formation in the 1960s as the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. Bill Kirchner organized the event and gave “special thanks to John Mosca, Maria Schneider, Judy Kahn, Douglas Purviance, Elizabeth Mosca, Nancy Oatts, Kristy Kadish, and Bill Prante.”

In addition to Kirchner, the speakers were drummer Dave Bailey, bassist Bill Crow, record producer John Snyder, author and critic Terry Teachout, Greg Bahora (one of Brookmeyer’s stepsons), the poet and drummer Michael Stephans, trumpeter Jimmy Owens, Brookmeyer’s student Darcy James Argue, Joel Thome, Ed Dix*#151;in whose band a teenage Brookmeyer was featured—trumpeter Clark Terry, who spoke via audio tape; and guitarist Jim Hall. There was a video presentation by composer and Brookmeyer colleague Maria Schneider, Ryan Truesdell, and Marie Le Claire with recordings, photographs and film clips going back more than 60 years. The video presentation, edited from still photos and film clips, will soon be posted on YouTube.

Between speakers were performances by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and various other ensembles. The Orchestra began the program with “Hello and Goodbye,” composed and arranged by Brookmeyer. Rich Perry, tenor saxophone, and Scott Robinson, baritone saxophone, were the soloists.

After Bailey and Kirchner spoke, a small ensemble played two Brookmeyer compositions, Open Country and Remembering. Along with Robinson (pictured) and Perry were Oliver Leicht, clarinet; Ed Neumeister and Christian Jakso, trombones; Kenny Werner, piano; Brad Shepik, guitar; Martin Wind, bass and John Hollenbeck, drums.

Bill Crow and John Snyder were the next speakers, after which the full Orchestra played Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark in Bob Brookmeyer’s arrangement. Dick Oatts was the alto saxophone soloist and spoke briefly after the performance.

Terry Teachout, Greg Bahora and Michael Stephans spoke, and Stephans offered a poem in memory of Brookmeyer. The Orchestra followed with “First Love Song,” composed and arranged by Brookmeyer and featuring Jim McNeely as piano soloist and speaker.

Jimmy Owens spoke and played an unaccompanied flugelhorn solo in tribute. He was followed by Darcy James Argue, a composer who introduced himself to Brookmeyer online and wound up studying with him.

Joel Thome’s remarks were from a different perspective; he had been Brookmeyer’s composition and conducting teacher. Joel had a stroke in the late 1990s and was in the hospital for seven months. During that time, Brookmeyer called him daily. I have known Joel since before the stroke and have always found him to be a relentlessly positive person. But he said that during the seven-month hospital stay he considered suicide. I’m not sure I believe that it was a serious consideration but he credited Bob’s wisdom and sense of humor for getting him over the idea.

Bill Kirchner played a beautiful solo version of “Body and Soul” with Steve Kuhn, piano, one of only two pieces on the program with which Bob Brookmeyer had no connection. It was followed by “In a Rotten Mood,” composed and arranged by Brookmeyer and played by John Mosca, trombone; Steve Kuhn, piano; Bill Crow, bass and Michael Stephan, drums.

Ed Dix, who knew Brookmeyer when they were teenagers, spoke next. Bob had played both piano and slide trombone with Dix’s band in the middle 1940s.

The final two musical selections were “Seesaw,” composed and arranged by Bob Brookmeyer and featuring John Hollenbeck on drums with the Orchestra, and “I Remember You” (the only piece other than Body and Soul with which Brookmeyer had no involvement) played by Lee Konitz, alto saxophone, and Kenny Werner, piano. Brief remarks by Jim Hall (pictured) ended the program.

Throughout the evening, every speaker made reference to Brookmeyer’s wonderful playing and writing, his biting wit, his honesty and his wisdom.

Shortly after the memorial service Bill Crow, who played bass with Brookmeyer in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and Mulligan’s big band—among other mutual associations—sent this:

The Brookmeyer memorial tonight was a great program. Vanguard jazz ork sounded beautiful, and played the S out of Bob’s compositions. Lots of good memories from the speakers, including me, Dave Bailey, Jim Hall, and one of Bob’s stepsons. A recorded encomium from Clark Terry was played, and Maria Schneider put together a film presentation of photos through Bob’s life accompanied by music from his early Kansas City days through the last CD with the New Arts Orch. Very touching. I played a couple of tunes with Steve Kuhn, Bill Kirchner and Michael Stephans, Lee Konitz did a duet with Kenny Werner, and Scott Robinson led an octet in a couple of Bob’s tunes. It was good to see so many old friends, and a few young ones.

They read your nice contribution at the beginning.

My contribution, requested by Mr. Kirchner, was this:

With Bob, jazz was never a Last Chance. No matter what the Bracket, no matter what The Wrinkle, even when he was In A Rotten Mood over Big City Life, for Brookmeyer music was always Open Country.

Kirchner also read what Brookmeyer’s contemporary and peer Bill Holman wrote for the occasion:

The term “highly evolved person” is being thrown about a lot lately, but no one personified it more than Brookmeyer.

I met him in 1957 when, after reading in a record review that his playing was “erudite,” and wanting to meet such a person, I introduced myself at the Lighthouse in LA. Fifteen minutes later we were at a liquor store buying a jug of Scotch. I imagine that he paid; he was always a tabgrabber.

Intelligence, humor, honesty (brutal), enthusiasm, patience, care, and most of all, love. These are a few of the words that come to mind, though there are probably others that haven’t been coined yet.

Bob had a way with words as well as with music; could have been a literary writer. When he was living in LA he made a few rehearsals with my band, and one day I asked him what he thought of a chart that I had brought in and rehearsed. His answer: “Glad you did, wish you hadn’t.”

That was a friend.

Finally, Bob at work: a good way to remember him.

The apricot tree is in blossom and the daffodils are daffodilling.

The Rifftides staff hopes that it’s nice where you are, too.

Getz from an album recorded in his late period, with Lou Levy, piano; Monty Budwig, bass; and Victor Lewis, drums.

In the Seattle Times, critic Paul deBarros tells of a man named Bill Carter finding in a storage container “a treasure chest from the golden age of jazz.” The unearthing may not equal the importance of the discovery by another Carter—Howard—of King Tut’s tomb, but it is creating excitement among devotees of classic mainstream jazz. deBarros writes:

Among the hundreds of tapes Carter retrieved from that container was a recording of a 1956 Seattle concert that featured Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Stan Getz — yes, all on the same show.

Hard to believe, but proof positive has arrived with “Jazz at the Philharmonic: Seattle 1956…

That JATP concert also included Sonny Stitt, Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa, among others. The recording is being released today. To get the whole story, click here.

Long after the era of this post card, I heard a lot of music in the old Civic Auditorium, including the JATP concert deBarros writes about. I listened there to, among others, Frank Sinatra at the height of his powers, Dmitri Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic, and guitarist Andres Segovia all alone on the stage of that big old barn, playing to a full house. After a Dave Brubeck Quartet concert, I stood backstage at the edge of a crowd of Seattle musicians as Eugene Wright explained how to count in 5/4, a time signature with which Brubeck and company had recently intrigued the jazz world. “You’ve got to think, ‘1,2,3 – 1,2’” he said. “If you try to count 1,2,3,4,5,” you won’t swing.”

In the mid-1950s, the big sign outside the Civic bore a message that became a part of jazz lore:

After he saw the Gerry Mulligan birthday post below, Jack Reilly sent the following update on that day at Newport in 1958.

I played after the Mulligan set, with the John LaPorta Quartet: Dick Carter, bass; Charlie Perry; drums; me, piano; and LaPorta, alto sax. Jimmy Giuffre’s new pianoless trio also played that same day, but after our set,

We played 2 of my tunes, DECIDED and SEARCHING, and one of John’s originals, THE MOST MINOR and the standard DARN THAT DREAM. Unfortunately we were left out of the film. However, we went into the recording studios in December, 1958, and recorded the above set of tunes plus 4 more. It was released on Everest Records. You may find the CD reissue on Amazon or in a Japanese record store.

John was an amazing musician, arranger and improvisor and later becameBerklee College of Music’s superstar teacher. His biography, Playing It By Ear, is a good read with lots of insights into the jazz world. There’s a special chapter devoted only to the quartet. John was proud of the quartet as I was for being chosen for the piano chair.

At 26, this was my official debut into the jazz world. I wasn’t nervous at all!!

DIck Carter, blind by age nine, was our harmonic foundation. I’m sure Bill Crow remembers him and his huge, warm, booming bass sound. Charlie Perry was a flawless technician and time-keeper. He cooked like mad!

Maybe Bert Stern has a private video of our set?

The LaPorta album, titled The Most Minor, is on a Fresh Sound CD reissue. Here is one track from it.

John LaPorta was a member of Woody Herman’s First Herd and recorded with Lennie Tristano, Charles Mingus and Helen Merrill. He soloed on clarinet on Herman’s recording of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto and was jazz soloist for the New York Philharmonic’s 1958 performance of Teo Macero’s Fusion. He died in 2004 at the age of 84.

Gene Lees died two years ago this month, on April 22. That day I wrote, “We lost a writer unsurpassed at illuminating music and the world that musicians inhabit. I lost a cherished colleague whose work inspired me, a dear friend whose companionship brightened my existence.”

The Portland, Oregon, broadcaster, poet and visual essayist Lynn Darroch was another of Gene’s friends and admirers, although, he said in a message, “It wasn’t a smooth ride.” There were no smooth rides with Gene. There were lots of rewarding ones. With Lynn’s permission, here is the video remembrance he posted this week. Piano is by Tom Grant, audio mixing and mastering by Jonathan Swanson.

For more of Lynn Darroch’s work, visit this page. To read my musings on that sad day in 2010—and the outpouring of comments from Rifftides readers—go here.

Following the recent post about plunger mutes, Rifftides reader Deborah Hendrick sent a reqest:

Would you give us a history lesson sometime, on the origin of mutes. “Jazz” seems to be played with muted brass more often than not. I’ve always wondered why, and how the practice began.

Aside from the plunger, mutes for brass instruments are not primarily specific to jazz, and they go back much further. I can give you no better history of mutes than this brief one on a website devoted to them.

As an appendix to that document, here is the brilliant cornetist Warren Vaché demonstrating a raft of mutes to his student Laura Telman.

For more of Vaché on the cornet and trumpet, go to his ArtistHouse page.

Rifftides reader Larry Peterson suggested that while two days of March remain, it would be a good idea to revisit an Antonio Carlos Jobim classic. It is, of course, “Águas de Marco.” March is the rainiest time of year in Rio de Janeiro. Jobim fashioned the progress of the music and the Portuguese lyric to suggest the storm waters’ relentless flow toward the sea. The words, in Portuguese and in his English version, constitute a paen to “the promise of life.” A 2001 poll of Brazilian musicians and journalists concluded that it was the best of all Brazilian songs.

Jobim performed “The Waters of March” often with his friend the nonpareil singer Elis Regina. This 1974 version from a television show has attracted 2,155,406 YouTube viewers. No wonder.

To see Jobim’s lyrics in Portuguese and English—side by side&#151click here.

We still get questions about whether there will be a service in memory of Bob Brookmeyer, who died in December. The answer is yes. This is the updated information from Bob’s friend and colleague Bill Kirchner:

Here’s a reminder about the memorial for valve trombonist/composer/arranger Bob Brookmeyer (December 19,1929-December 15, 2011).

It will be held at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church (E. 54th St. between 3rd and Lexington Avenues) in New York City on Wednesday, April 11, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. A reception will follow immediately afterward at the church.

That evening, Bob’s music will be played by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (for which he wrote for over forty years) and two specially-assembled smaller groups. There will also be a number of distinguished speakers: (in alphabetical order) Darcy James Argue, Greg Bahora, Dave Bailey, Bill Crow, Ed Dix, Jim Hall, Bill Kirchner, Jim McNeely, Dick Oatts, Jimmy Owens, John Snyder, Michael Stephans, and Terry Teachout. In addition, there will be an audio tribute by Clark Terry, and a video presentation by Maria Schneider, Ryan Truesdell, and Marie Le Claire.

I’m the coordinator of this event, so any inquiries can be directed to me: kirch@mindspring.com

Over the weekend, the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra played a concert devoted to music associated with Frank Sinatra. The SRJO is one of the world’s finest big bands dedicated to preserving the spirit and substance of the jazz tradition. Drummer Clarence Acox and saxophonist Michael Brockman co-lead the orchestra and have developed admirable projects devoted to works of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Jimmy Heath, among other major figures.

The Sinatra program at The Seasons in Yakima, east of Seattle, might have been subtitled, “And his great arrangers.” The charts were by Nelson Riddle, of course, and by Benny Carter, Thad Jones, Quincy Jones, Neal Hefti, Billy May and the drastically underappreciated Billy Byers. The concert opened with baritone saxophonist Bill Ramsey (pictured anchoring the saxophone section), a veteran of the Ellington and Count Basie bands, soloing on Byers’ arrangement of “All of Me.” It progressed through nearly two hours of Sinatra’s best-known numbers, several of them featuring 22-year-old Danny Quintero, a singer with good time, intonation and phrasing who interprets, rather than imitates Sinatra. There were impressive solos by pianist Randy Halberstadt, trumpeters Mike Van Bebber and Syd Potter, trombonist Dan Marcus and tenor saxophonists Steve Tressler and Tobi Stone.

There is no video of the Saturday night concert. Regrettably, there is little but fragments of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra on the web, but the Rifftides staff found a complete performance from an earlier concert. The spoken introduction is by Clarence Acox, the trumpet solo by Jay Thomas.

For more about the SRJO, go here.

The calendar claims that we are two days into spring. There seems to be some mistake. This is what the dawn disclosed this morning. That gardening shed isn’t going to see much action today.

This Blossom Dearie album also has other songs about spring. They’ll help us through an unexpectedly wintry day.

This series of brief reviews calls your attention to recordings that captured the Rifftides staff’s interest and may capture yours.

Chris Brubeck’s Triple Play: Live At Arthur Zankel Music Center (Blue Forest)

As Triple Play, Chris Brubeck, harmonicist Peter Madcat Ruth and guitarist Joel Brown have had fun for more than 20 years. Brubeck plays piano, bass and trombone. They all sing. It’s a jazz band, or a blues band, or a folk group. It’s all of those. In this alternately raucous and tender July, 2011, concert, the repertoire includes pieces by Fats Waller, Robert Johnson, W.C. Handy, Paul Desmond and Chris’s 90-year-old father Dave, who makes a surprise appearance in the middle of “Blue Rondo a la Turk” (the crowd goes wild). The elder Brubeck stays to play, among other things, a gorgeous unaccompanied “Dziekuje (Thank You),” back his son’s blowsy trombone on “Black and Blue” and get off some sparkling single-note lines on “St. Louis Blues.” Brown’s clarinetist father, a stripling of 85, sits in convincingly on several pieces. Ruth plays what is likely the first jaw harp solo ever on “Take Five,” and caps it with a wild harmonica coda. It’s all great fun, which is yet to be declared illegal in jazz.

Allen Lowe, Blues and the Empirical Truth (Music & Arts)

In a comprehensive sense, Lowe’s is a blues band. Three CDs with 52 tracks make the case for the tireless composer, saxophonist, guitarist and author’s Truth—that the blues in all its variety and malleability is the core of jazz. Lowe demonstrates using musicianship that employs intimacy, bombast, comedy, suggestiveness, wryness, profundity and a healthy dose of concepts that have developed in jazz since the advent of Ornette Coleman. Characters as diverse as Buddy Bolden, Pete Brown, Dave Brubeck, Davey Schildkraut, Lennie Tristano, Bud Powell, Elvis Presley and the Carter Family inspire some of the pieces. Lowe has the stimulating help of trombonist Roswell Rudd, guitarist Marc Ribot, pianists Matthew Shipp and Lewis Porter, and a few of Lowe’s fellow adventurers in the Portland, Maine, jazz community. This is a provocative and valuable collection.

Daryl Sherman, Mississippi Belle: Cole Porter in the Quarter (Audiophile)

The pianist and singer deepens her relationship with Cole Porter, forged in years of playing his piano at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Porter wrote the title tune for a movie in 1943, but it was rejected and has never before been recorded. The Quarter is the French Quarter in New Orleans, which is where Sherman recorded this collection of 13 Porter songs. Some are among his best known (“Get Out of Town,” “Let’s Do It”), some less often performed (“Ours,” “Tale of the Oyster”). Sherman gives all of them her beguiling phrasing, interpretation and vocal sunshine. When she accompanies herself or solos, she finds substantial harmonies. When her only accompaniment is Jesse Boyd’s bass, her intonation never falters. In this drummerless trio, Tom Fischer solos on tenor sax or clarinet.

Marianne Solivan, Prisoner Of Love (Hipnotic)

Solivan has attracted an impressive coterie of fans among New York’s musicians. They include Christian McBride, who plays bass on her first album and Jeremy Pelt, who produced the CD and has a trumpet solo on “Moon Ray.” In his liner notes, McBride emphasizes Solivan’s musicianship, which is apparent in this collection of standards. She applies it with reserve and taste, concentrating on melody and the meaning of lyrics. She refrains from scatting, the downfall of young vocalists who want to be hip. Her skill with “Prisoner of Love,””Day Dream” and “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry” establish her hipness credential. Betty Carter’s “I Can’t Help It,” and “Social Call,”—forever associated with Ernestine Anderson—endorse it. Pianists Xavier Davis and Michael Kanan appear with Solivan, as well as guitarist Peter Bernstein, bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Jonathan Blake. It’s a fine debut.

Please return to Rifftides soon for more reviews as we attempt to catch up with the never-ending flow of jazz releases.

Mark Cantor (pictured, right), the preeminent jazz film archivist, has established a web channel of clips. If the first batch is an indication, the collection has the makings of a bonanza for viewers interested in the music and in the convoluted history of jazz in motion pictures and on television.

As an example of the choice moments Cantor has posted: just in case you didn’t see Sweetheart Of The Campus when it came out in 1941, you missed a rare movie appearance by Leo Watson and the Spirits of Rhythm. Watson (pictured, left) developed his infectious scat singing style before the term was in general use. He influenced later scat specialists including Ella Fitzgerald and Eddie Jefferson. He worked with Gene Krupa and made appearances on records with Artie Shaw, Slim Gaillard, Benny Goodman, Vic Dickenson and Billie Holiday. In his YouTube commentary on the clip, Cantor writes:

Teddy Bunn accompanies on guitar, and that is either Wilbur or Douglas Daniels on tipple to the left; they were both in the group, but I don’t know which of the two made the film gig. The string bass looks like Wilson Myers to me, but of this I am not certain.

As for the bandleader who introduces the Spirits of Rhythm, yes, he’s that Ozzie Nelson.

Cantor has also posted film or TV performances by—among others—Punch Miller, The Lighthouse All-Stars, Adrian Rollini and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Surely, L-H-R knew about Leo Watson. To see Cantor’s collection so far, go here.

Nat Cole was born March 17, 1917. He did not appear to be Irish, but his birthday falls on St. Patrick’s Day. What better excuse to remember a great musician? Cole did not record many Irish songs, but there is one in his 1946 collaboration with Lester Young’s trio. We begin our Nat Cole birthday observance with Lester Young, tenor saxophone; Cole, piano; Buddy Rich, drums, and “Peg ‘O My Heart.” In an anomaly that only the person who posted this on YouTube could explain, the video continues for about 20 minutes after the four-minute piece ends, so unless you’re in love with the fuzzy representation of the album cover, you might want to bail out when the track is through and move to the next section.

Cole became one of the most popular singers in the world—we’ll get to that toward the end—but he remained a pianist whose touch, harmonic depth, melodic creativity and swing set an example and standard for dozens of others, including Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Tommy Flanagan (not Irish) and a legion of their successors. Here is Cole in 1957 on his television show, with two versions of “Tea For Two.” Athough the difference could be in dubbing speed, the first one seems to be in A-flat, the second a half-step up in the more challenging key of A (I don’t have perfect pitch; I have a piano).

Now, Nat King Cole and his trio plus Jack Costanzo on conga drum, with the Bobby Troup song that kept Cole on hit parades, juke boxes and the radio for years and will no doubt be on the web and digital downloads for decades more.

Now and then, the Rifftides staff calls your attention to recordings selected from the stacks of more or less recent arrivals. Comments are brief, in an effort—no doubt doomed—to catch up with worthwhile releases.

Dutch Jazz Orchestra, Moon Dreams: Rediscovered Music of Gil Evans & Gerry Mulligan (Challenge)

Languishing in the stacks, this 2009 album called to me. I’m glad it did. It features arrangements that Gil Evans, in his mid-30s, and Gerry Mulligan, in his early 20s, wrote for the Claude Thornhill band in the late 1940s. Their work from that period anticipates what they, John Lewis and John Carisi created in 1949 and ‘50 for the nine-piece Miles Davis band later indelibly labeled Birth Of The Cool. Impeccably played by a fine Dutch repertory big band, the pieces include Evans’ chart on “Yardbird Suite” and his medley of “Easy Living,” a stunning “Moon Dreams” and “Everything Happens to Me.” There are buoyant Mulligan arrangements of “Rose of the Rio Grande,” “Joost at the Roost“and “Poor Little Rich Girl.” Sixty years later, all sound remarkably undated. In another 60, Evans’ treatment of “Lover Man” will still be fresh. If The Cool was born with the Davis band, it had a rich gestation period with Thornhill.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Mbira, Dark Lady Of The Sonnets (TUM)

Smith suggests imagery for each of the five pieces. If you are capable of envisioning 60,000 Zulus dancing on the surface of a lake in “Zulu Water Festival,” fine, but you need not hear this as program music. It may be best to let it wash over you and discover what your mind develops in response. Like all of Smith’s recent work, this transcends the category of free jazz with which the trumpeter and composer is usually identified. It is no surprise that the formidable percussionist Pheeroan akLaff, a longtime colleague, works hand-in-glove with Smith. Min Xiao-Fen, born in Nanjing, is a surprise. A collaborator with John Zorn, Jane Ira Bloom and Björk, she makes remarkable music with the pipa, an ancient Chinese stringed instrument, and with her voice. She and Smith occasionally play carefully crafted unison lines that have the precision of electricity. Her singing on the title track is haunting. The three players alternately blend with and highlight one another. Space is an essential element of their music. Smith calls the trio Mbira, the name of an African thumb piano, although there is no African thumb piano on the CD. Consider it part of the mystique of the music, which in his notes Smith says is in “a creative contextualization defined in the contemporary music language.” That language encompasses the blues. A pronounced blues sensibility washes through and beneath the surface of the playing, which manages to be at once contemplative and daring.

Phil Dwyer, Changing Seasons (Alma)

The composer and orchestrator Phil Dwyer allows Dwyer the tenor saxophone virtuoso a solo in the “Summer” section of this beautifully realized album. He gives fellow Canadian Ingrid Jensen a trumpet slot that is integral to the success of “Winter.” Most of the solos, however, are by Mark Fewer, a dazzling violinist who glides lyrically through Dwyer’s seasonal suite. The work may have been inspired at least in part, as any music with such a theme must be, by the example Vivaldi set 250 years ago. Clearly, though, Dwyer’s experience in modern jazz and classical music provides the basis for the pieces. He integrates a full string section and a big band in what amounts to a violin concerto blended into a concerto grosso. He and Fewer, who is not only the featured soloist but also conducts the strings, get what could have been an ungainly machine to swing mightily in the “Winter” section. In an unusual achievement for our length-obsessed CD era, the suite runs 35-and-a-half minutes, but it is so satisfying that it’s hard to imagine why it should be longer

Anthony Wilson, Seasons: Live At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art (Goat Hill DVD and CD)

Wilson’s album appeared at about the same time as Dwyer’s. Aside from subject matter and titles, they could hardly be more different. John Monteleone, an American guitar maker respected by his fellow craftsmen and revered by guitarists, created four magnificent archtop instruments named for the seasons, then commissioned Wilson to write a suite for them. Wilson engaged fellow guitarists Steve Cardenas, Chico Pinheiro and Julian Lage to perform the work with him in concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Fittingly, the Monteleone guitars—subtly tinted and illustrated by the luthier—will be on display at the museum through July 4th as works of art. Each of the guitarists is featured in a movement of the seasonal cycle, with the other three playing Wilson’s often-intricate ensemble accompaniments. Cardenas begins with the moody “Winter;” the young Brazilian Pinheiro dances through the samba “Spring;” Wilson celebrates “Summer” with an Ozarks twang; Lage has the central part in “Autumn’s” harmonic complexities, wrapping up the 32-minute suite. The DVD has the suite, masterfully photographed and directed at the concert, a documentary about Monteleone making the guitars and Wilson writing the music, and an extensive slide show. The CD has the suite, each of the guitarists in a solo feature, then all of them together in a ‘round robin on Joni Mitchell’s ”The Circle Game.” This is a remarkable guitar chamber music experience.

More reviews coming soon, listening and contemplation time permitting.