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In his Jazz Profiles blog, Steve Cerra’s stock in trade is—logically enough— profiles of musicians. He copiously illustrates them with photographs, album covers and sound clips and often adds personal reflections or anecdotes to enrich the mix. The lead story that Steve put up today is about the late tenor and soprano saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

Thompson worked in the 1940s and ‘50s in Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet and with the big bands of Billy Eckstine, Tom Talbert and Count Basie. Hank Jones, Oscar Pettiford and Milt Jackson were among the colleagues who cherished their relationship with Thompson. He made a notable impact on Benny Golson in the early 1950s as Golson formed his style. Half a century later, the young saxophonist Chris Byars adopted Thompson as his model. Go here for the Jazz Profiles post, which includes Steve’s album cover photo essay to the tune of a gorgeous Thompson ballad. It also has Bob Porter’s informative notes about Thompson.

While you’re visiting Cerraville, if you scroll down the left-hand column you will eventually come to Steve’s recent posting of an essay I wrote some time ago to accompany the Time Signatures box of CDs tracing Dave Brubeck’s career from his college days to the 1990s. It has a lot of reading and a lot of pictures.

For video of Lucky Thompson in action in Paris in the late 1950s, see this Rifftides archive piece.

Reacting to the Norman Granz item in the following exhibit, Alan Broadbent writes:

I’m sure you and your readers must be aware of this precious film, but for the record here it is. Is it from the legendary Granz vault?

Yes. Granz produced, wrote and narrated the film In 1950. He titled it Improvisation. The photographer was Gjon Mili, who had collaborated with Granz six years earlier on the short subject Jammin’ The Blues. The players recorded the music in advance. For the filming, they synchronized fingering and breathing to match the recorded track—some with greater success than others. The synching efforts seem to account for the amusement among the musicians. This cast of players is typical of those Granz assembled for his Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts.

Collective personnel: Charlie Parker, 
Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, Bill Harris, Lester Young, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips, Ella Fitzgerald.

That clip, outtakes and a good deal of subsidiary material, exist on this DVD.

Kenny Burrell has joined the parade of major jazz artists entering octogenarianism and performing at a high level. The guitarist is of a generation of Detroit musicians including Tommy Flanagan, Pepper Adams, Elvin Jones, Roland Hanna and Louis Hayes that made a significant impact on jazz. Burrell’s 80th birthday was a week ago. He is preparing for a concert next weekend. Here’s more from a Scott Zimberg profile of the guitarist in The Los Angeles Times:

Part of what’s kept Burrell afloat over the years is musical focus. Music, he says, “has to be a balance between heart and mind. The thing is to not let your technique or your analytical side overshadow your feelings. There’s one more thing you’ve gotta do — you’ve got to be consistent. That takes work, it takes concentration, it takes focus, it takes dedication.”

He’s often praised for qualities like taste, discipline and aversion to musical cliché. “I sometimes think that phrasing is a lost art in jazz, and perhaps especially among guitarists,” Gioia says. “But Burrell knows how to shape a phrase, where to place the proper emphasis, how to construct a solo. He has unerring instincts — like a great boxer, who has a feel for the right move at the right moment.”

Burrell sees jazz soloing as a conversation between musician and listener. “If I was talking too fast, or not taking breaths, not giving you time to take it in — it would not get across very well.”

To him, the blues — which can lead lesser players to volubility — is about understatement. Music begins and ends with silence, he says. “In between, it’s up to you. You should make a statement. And when you’ve made your statement — which should be important to you, you should mean it — you should stop.”

To read all of Timberg’s article, which traces Burrell’s career, go here.

Burrell appeared on Japanese Television in 1990, with bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Sherman Ferguson, playing Duke Pearson’s “Jeannine.”

The great Brazilian bossa nova pioneer turned 80 in June and will be giving a concert in Rio de Janeiro on November 15, Brazil’s Republic Day. For details, go here. If you don’t read Portuguese, just enjoy the graphics and his singing in the background.

Then watch this video of Gilberto performing one of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s greatest hits, accompanied by the composer.

Maybe 80 really is the new 60.

Two alto saxophonists who came to prominence in the second wave of bebop celebrated birthdays on the same day this week. On Wednesday, November 2, Herb Geller (on the right) turned 83, Phil Woods, (left) 80. Geller has lived in Hamburg, Germany, since 1965. Woods lives in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. Both have active international playing careers. Geller’s daughter Olivia wrote that her dad was “gutted” when the day before his birthday he got the news of pianist Walter Norris’s death; their association went back to the early 1950s. His spirits soon came up, she wrote, and he played two gigs this week, Thursday at a Greek restaurant and his birthday concert last night at the Hamburg Birdland: “So no big celebration or anything out of the ordinary,” Olivia said, “just his usual not-showing off personality.”

Here’s Geller at a mere 82 not showing off last February at the Blue Lamp in Aberdeen, Scotland, with Paul Kirby, piano; Martin Zenker, bass; and Rick Hollander, drums.

In the fall of 2010, Woods traveled to Spain for a performance with the Barcelona Jazz Orquestra. This video gives us a polished rehearsal of “My Man Benny,” Woods’s tribute to Benny Carter. I cannot identify the tenor saxophone soloist. The pianist is Ignasi Terraza.

On November 13, Woods will be knee-deep in the Zoot Fest honoring Zoot Sims and Al Cohn at East Stroudsburg University in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania.

Happy birthday, gentlemen. Many more, please.

Pianist Walter Norris died this week at his home in Berlin. He was two months short of his 80th birthday. Because of his early recording with Ornette Coleman and later experimental work, he is often described as associated primarily with free jazz, but Norris’s stylistic range was virtually unlimited. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and first received substantial notice in the 1950s in Los Angeles when he recorded with Jack Sheldon and was the pianist on Coleman’s first album. After he moved to New York in 1960, Norris, guitarist Billy Bean and bassist Hal Gaylor formed a trio called The Trio. They made one highly regarded album. In the mid-‘70s he replaced Roland Hanna in the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, recorded with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams and later worked briefly with Charles Mingus. He moved to Germany in 1977. In the 1990s, he recorded a series of albums for Concord, from solo piano early in the Maybeck series to a quartet that included the adventurous tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. This page shows several of Norris’s albums.

In a 1975 New Yorker profile of Norris, Whitney Balliet summed up aspects of the mastery that made the pianist an idol of aware listeners and musicians, even though he never received wide public notice.

His touch is even and light. He uses his considerable technique beautifully; his arpeggios, which whip and coil, have logic and continuity; his double-time dashes are parenthetical and light up what they interrupt; his long single note passages continually pause and breathe; no tempo rattles the clarity of his articulation, which has a private, singing quality.

Here is a track from Norris’s 1995 duo recording with bassist George Mraz.

A documentary film about Norris, directed by Chuck Dodson, is officially unreleased but being circulated by the director as a pre-release DVD without standard packaging.

A concert in Seattle this week will kick off a fund-raising effort to benefit the composer, arranger and bandleader Jim Knapp. In a recent operation, Knapp lost his right foot and part of his lower leg to diabetes. His insurance doesn’t come close to covering his expenses. A group of musicians and Knapp admirers spearheaded by saxophonist and composer Steve Griggs has organized a campaign to ease Knapp’s financial burden. Their goal is $30,000. The concert Wednesday evening will be at the Triple Door in downtown Seattle as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival. The fund-raising sponsors have also set up a donation website.

Knapp’s musical activities have been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, but the influence of three brilliant albums has reached far beyond that region to affect other composers and arrangers, including Jim McNeely and Myra Melford. He established the music program at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts 40 years ago and continues to teach there. Among his latest projects is Scrape, a string orchestra co-led with violinist Eyvind Kang. “Just A Moment” is one of Knapp’s compositions for that group.

For a Rifftides review of a concert by The Jim Knapp Orchestra, click here.

Meet the official 2011 Rifftides Halloween jack-o’lantern, designed to scare trick or treaters out of their costumes and away from RT world headquarters. In case that doesn’t work, several pounds of cheap candy are standing by.

It may be that jazz musicians have recorded music with a Halloween theme worth relaying to the Rifftides readership. If so, I couldn’t find it. However, by merest chance, the night before Halloween I came across video of the piano team of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe. The clip begins with a tour of the Steinway piano factory before we see and hear Anderson and Roe in a four-hands performance of Franz Schubert’s formidable “Der Erlkönig.” Schubert was inspired by the Goethe poem of that name. If you’re not familiar with Goethe’s story, you are encouraged to go here and read it in German or English before you watch the video.

Somehow Anderson and Roe never drop a note or miss a beat despite the horror, the horror…

If I were you, unless you have urgent business there, I’d give the Steinway factory a wide berth.

Last Friday, pianist and composer Emil Viklický received the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit from the country’s president, Vaclav Klaus. With his international reputation, Viklický (pictured on the right, with the president) is one of his country’s best-known musicians. Among the ten others receiving the medal were the Shakespeare translator Martin Hilsky, champion ski jumper Jiri Raska, and Jan Krulis-Randa, a U.S. climatologist of Czech origin. Bassist George Mraz is a previous winner. Viklický helped President Klaus to establish the Jazz na Hradě series of concerts that have become regular events at Prague Castle, the Czech counterpart of the White House.

Here is Viklický last January in the concluding number of a New York concert with Scott Robinson, a colleague since their student days at Berklee College of Music. The composition is “Touha” from Viklický’s Sinfonietta CD.

For more about Viklický and Robinson, including additional video, go to this Rifftides archive post.

A recent discussion among jazz researchers disclosed what to many of us was news, that there exists video of Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter performing portions of Focus. There has never been anything else quite like the 1961 Verve album of Getz soloing over, around and inside Sauter’s dazzling score for orchestra. Getz was widely quoted as saying that of all his recordings, it was his favorite. In 1964 Getz and Sauter had a return engagement, the music for an Arthur Penn film starring Warren Beatty. Shortly after they made it, Getz told me, “If you think Focus was good, wait until you hear the movie soundtrack I just did with Eddie.” The film was Mickey One. The music suits the movie, which is brilliant, quirky and uneven. Getz’s playing and Sauter’s score were superb, but in the nature of movie music, their job was to accommodate to the film’s twists and turns. The score falls short of the overarching vision and consistency of Focus. I have always assumed that Getz’s enthusiasm for Mickey One was inspired by immediate post-session euphoria. There is more about how the Mickey One music came about in my notes for the CD reissue of the soundtrack.

At any rate, the Focus video that has surfaced is said to be from the Edie Adams television show, which ran on ABC for 13 episodes in 1963 and 1964. I presume that it is her voice at the beginning. The clip is preceded by promo slides in two languages, and the film has the look of a kinescope that has been transferred a few times, but the sound quality is generally good. We hear a bit of “Pan” and “Once Upon a Time.” This is a find.

There are reports—or rumors—of additional video of Getz and Sauter with other music from Focus, but so far no one seems to have found it.

A Rifftides reader asked what happened with Bob Belden’s Miles Español video and audio project that I took a brief hiatus to contribute to this summer. It is out as a two-CD set. My essay on the African, Spanish, Caribbean and New Orleans influences that led to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, among many other cultural and musical phenomena, is part of the package.

Friend Dave Cohler sent me a few puns recently and reminded me of one I sent him long before it became a part of my Paul Desmond biography. Desmond and Jim Hall (pictured) concocted what I described in the book as the most elaborate pun I’ve ever encountered. He loved to recite it:

A boy of Italian descent named Carbaggio is born in Germany. With his swarthy looks and dark curly hair, he grows up feeling a bit of a misfit among the blond Teutons. He tries to compensate by being more German than the Germans, but he’s only boring, and is not accepted. When he’s a young man, he escapes to Paris. Shortly after he arrives there, he visits a gift shop and is caught stealing a brass miniature of the Eiffel Tower. The police arrest him and give him the choice of going to jail or immediately leaving the country. He chooses freedom and buys passage on the first ship outbound from Marseilles. It takes him to New York. Thinking he’d like a career as a broadcaster, he goes the RCA Building and walks into the office of General David Sarnoff. Sarnoff says there are no air positions open, but he offers the boy a job as a strikebreaker. Carbaggio takes it. When the strike is over, he finds himself on a union blacklist. He moves out to Long Island and gets a job at the sonar equipment company owned by a man named Harris. He studies English, and after several years has improved to the point where he gets a job as a disc jockey on a radio station, doing a program called Rock Time.

He has realized his dream. He’s a routine Teuton Eiffel-lootin’ Sarnoff goon from Harris Sonar, Rock-Time Carbaggio.

Culturally deprived Rifftides readers mystified by the payoff line should click here and let Jo Stafford bring them up to date.

Here’s another Desmond-Hall collaboration, with Gene Cherico, bass, and Connie Kay, drums. 1963.

Shortly after Pete Rugolo died this week, Jeff Sultanof offered to contribute a piece putting Rugolo’s work in perspective. I was delighted to accept and flattered that he considered Rifftides the proper place for his essay.

Jeff is a native of New York City, where he lives and works. He is a composer, orchestrator, editor, educator and researcher greatly admired in the community of professional musicians, critics and academics. He has analyzed, studied, edited and taught the music of Gerald Wilson, Robert Farnon, Harry Warren and Miles Davis, among others. The Rifftides staff is honored to present Mr. Sultanof’s thoughts about the importance of Pete Rugolo.

The career of Pete Rugolo as a film and television composer has been covered elsewhere in great detail. As good as his work in that world was, Rugolo’s importance is far greater elsewhere. And that is what I wish to celebrate here.

The musical medium delivering popular music in the twenties through the mid-40s has been called a lot of things in retrospect– an orchestra, a big band, a jazz ensemble and a stage band. Back in that period, its primary function was providing music for dancing. Songs made their way to bandleaders and were assigned to writers who loved arranging the good ones and tried to do something at least interesting with the duds. Singers interpreted the lyrics, and the groups made records to promote the songs and the bands.

It was Paul Whiteman who liberated the ensemble to play concert music, later followed by Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw. But such ensembles and the opportunities to play such music were few. Agents wanted their clients to make money, and the way to do that was feature a unique sound and come up with a hit record so that you could break into the big time and make some real money at ballrooms, hotels and movie theatres.

Things changed after World War Two and the time was right for a new ensemble that could concertize as well as play for dancing. Luckily, an excellent musician named Stan Kenton was not only a good arranger and bandleader, but also an excellent salesman. Stanley liked the music of a soldier he’d met sometime in 1944. When the soldier got out of the army, Pete Rugolo had a job. He would become one of the world’s great composers, helping to change the world of the big band and showing composers around the world that the resources of saxes, brass and rhythm had barely been explored. He certainly wasn’t the only one to do this at the time (one thinks of George Handy, Gerald Wilson, Johnny Richards, Paul Villepigue and Ralph Burns, who were also expanding the vocabulary of the dance band), but thanks to the success of the Kenton orchestra, he was able to explore, experiment and have his music recorded and heard by millions. No less than Leonard Bernstein was an admirer and fan of Rugolo’s music, and said so publicly; Rugolo would discover that many composers of concert music knew his work and were influenced by it. Some of his pieces were published in score format at a time when this simply was not done. For a couple of bucks, you could buy the score of a Rugolo composition to study. Even though he would achieve great success as a composer for television and film, it is the music he wrote during 1945 through 1948 which may be the most lasting and innovative.

After earning a B.A in music, Rugolo became one of the first male students at Mills College because he wanted to study with the eminent French composer, Darius Milhaud (pictured), who later taught Dave Brubeck. When he joined Kenton, Stanley gave Rugolo pop tunes to arrange. Later, he let Pete write what he wanted. Many band members hated his writing because it didn’t swing, but Kenton couldn’t have cared less. It was new, interesting, often highly dissonant and uncompromising, and it created for the band a commercial niche called “Progressive Jazz.” Even though Kenton had had his fill of dance dates, playing such music he was able to sell out major concert halls. Rugolo was one of the first composers for big band to write in meters other than 2, 3 or 4 (his “Elegy for Alto” is in 5/4 time). Desiring different tone colors and combinations, he wrote sections of pieces with brass in different mutes (five trumpets would be divided into one open, two in straight mutes, two in cup mutes). For many listeners, the musical vocabularies of Bartok, Stravinsky and Berg were first experienced with Kenton’s orchestra, and yet the stamp was uniquely Rugolo.

When Kenton disbanded, Rugolo moved to New York and became a staff arranger/producer for Capitol Records. He was responsible for signing and producing recordings of such artists as the Dave Lambert Singers, the Miles Davis Nonet (the famous “Birth of the Cool” recordings), Tadd Dameron, and Bill Harris. He arranged for Harry Belafonte, Nat Cole, Mel Torme and June Christy; he later wrote many wonderful albums for Christy during the fifties. He moved back to California to work at MGM Studios, often uncredited.

In 1954, he was signed to Columbia Records to record his own orchestra, but because of harassment by Mitch Miller, his tenure there was unpleasant even though the music was excellent. In 1956, he signed with Mercury Records and made a series of albums with all-star studio ensembles that are still fresh, exciting and beautifully recorded at the Capitol Tower. Happily, most of them have been reissued on CD and are available, but it wasn’t easy to get these recordings for many years. Some time ago, I met Rugolo and told him how much I loved these albums and hoped they’d be reissued. Rugolo agreed, saying “Have the guys at these labels even seen who’s playing on them? They should be available just because of all those great musicians.” This was typical of Pete; forget the music, reissue them because of who’s on them. Talk about humble!

He lived to the age of 95, long enough to be celebrated for his considerable contribution to music. Happily, YouTube has several clips of Pete conducting his music, so future generations will be able to see him in action.

Pete was a wine collector, along with Henry Mancini. I raise a glass to Pete Rugolo for the many ways in which he touched us and left his considerable mark in music. He left so much of it that his spirit will always be with us. That’s what is special about being an artist.

(©Jeff Sultanof 2011)

Here’s an example of Rugolo’s ingenuity with unusual instrumentation. From the 1961 Mercury album 10 Saxophones and 2 Basses, it’s the Charlie Barnet staple “Skyliner.”This was at the height of record companies’ exhiliration over early stereo. Rugolo knew how to take advantage of the possiblities of the new technology’s capacity for sonic range and depth without beating it to death.