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Marcus Strickland, Triumph of the Heavy (SMK).

In the liner notes, saxophonist Strickland writes, “Playing for a live audience heightens the adrenaline; you don’t have the luxury of correcting mistakes. It puts you on a high wire.” The second of the album’s two CDs, a club recording, captures his trio’s risk-taking and underlines the influence of an audience that truly listens. Strickland, his twin brother E.J. on drums and Ben Williams on bass hold the crowd’s attention and seem to thrive on its approval. In his work with Roy Haynes, Dave Douglas and Charles Tolliver, and on his own, Strickland has steadily developed as a creator of articulate solos. On tenor sax in the trio setting, it may be inevitable that he invites comparisons with Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, but there is little here to suggest that he is imitating them. Indeed, to single out two tenor performances, on “Mudbone” and “Prime” his brawny solos are free of quotes and of clichés, his own or anyone else’s. If the Stricklands’ tight interaction arises from their life as twins, it is enchanced by their musicianship. With his brother comping on saxophone, E.J. has a taut drum solo on the lengthy “Prime,” following an impressive Williams bass solo. In Jaco Pastorius’s “Portrait of Tracy,” Marcus Strickland takes a stabbing, pointillist approach on soprano as he spars with E.J.’s drums. It is one of only two pieces in the album that he didn’t write.

The first CD, made in a studio, adds David Bryant, a pianist who knows his McCoy Tyner but is most interesting when he works his own sparser harmonic ground. Bryant’s fleet solo on “’Lectronic,” strictly acoustic despite its name, is a highlight of his work here. In addition to soprano and tenor, Strickland plays alto saxophone and bass clarinet. Overdubbed, he uses all of them in the imaginative ensemble he wrote for Karriem Riggins’ “Virgo,” but solos—forcefully—only on tenor. On alto sax in five of this CD’s 10 pieces, Strickland has a tone notable for its depth and butteriness. In the pieces playing alto and soprano, he frequently achieves heaviness, in the sense of density and profundity. Yet, it is on tenor, the larger horn, that he is most often triumphant, weightless and free.

A note about the package: Strickland designed it and did the art work. He chose for the liner notes what appears to be 6-point type. Get out your magnifying glass.

Cecilia Coleman Big Band, Oh Boy! (PandaKat).

Before she moved to New York 13 years ago, Coleman established a solid reputation as a pianist and arranger in her native southern California. Studies with Charlie Shoemake and Tom Kubis provided a solid theoretical foundation for imaginative charts that she wrote for a variety of small groups she fronted or played with in Los Angeles. With New York’s pool of accomplished jazz players to choose from, she expanded her arranging scope and palette.

Coleman’s first big band album is replete with examples of the imagination of a craftsman whose freshness balances her writing influences. There are intimations, but not imitations, of Thad Jones, Bill Holman and Tadd Dameron, among others. Her voicings across the band’s sections in the pensive “Until Then” and the counter-punching movement between reeds, percussion and brass in the energetic title tune demonstrate her originality. There are plenty of other instances, among them the swell and ripple of brass figures in the waltz “Princess,” the keening quality she gives the reeds leading into Stan Killian’s tenor sax solo in “Liar, Liar,” and a hymn-like brass choir that sets up the improvised complexities of the ensemble behind alto saxophonist Peter Brainin in “Walk Away” before the piece melds with an arranged section that dissolves into a simple piano statement.

Coleman’s band is made up of a cross-section of veteran and newer players. It includes trombonists Sam Burtis and Mike Fahn, saxophonists Bobby Porcelli and Geoff Vidal, and trumpeters Kerry MacKillof and John Eckert. The rhythm team is Coleman, bassist Tim Givens and drummer Jeff Brillinger. Don Sickler guests on trumpet on one piece. All of the soloists are excellent, but Coleman’s arrangements—resourceful and free of clichés—are the stars of the album.

Tony Fruscella & Brew Moore, The 1954 Unissued Atlantic Session (Fresh Sound).

Fruscella was an enigmatic trumpeter with a deeply personal style, Moore a tenor saxophonist who once said that anyone who didn’t play like Lester Young was wrong. At a time when Dizzy Gillespie’s fiery playing was the general model, Fruscella was one of a few young trumpeters who concentrated on tone, lyricism and quiet melodic invention. Others were Don Joseph, Phil Sunkel, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. The Atlantic recordings that Fruscella and Moore made together in March of 1954 have never been released until now. Fruscella died in 1969, Moore in 1973.

The pieces are all blues except for one composition by pianist Bill Triglia. The CD contains nothing as captivating as Fruscella’s solo on “I’ll Be Seeing You” from the self-titled album he recorded for Atlantic the next year. Nonetheless, the trumpeter’s flowing lines and deep sound combine with Moore’s relaxation and swing in performances whose inventiveness surmounts the simplicity of the material. The rhythm section—Triglia, piano; Teddy Kotick, bass; Bill Heine, drums— is excellent in support. The underrated Triglia solos briefly and well. Fresh Sound rounds out the album with “Blue Bells” and “Roundup Time,” pieces that Fruscella recorded with Stan Getz in 1955 when he was in Getz’s quintet.

This is a valuable find. The album, all but a rumor for decades, was widely anticipated. Reports are that its first pressing sold out within weeks of release. Presumably, there will be another.

The irregular Rifftides series of posts inspired by moon sightings now continues. A half-hour ago, I glanced out the window at the harvest moon beginning its transit across the valley. It was framed by the branches of a huge fir tree, but clouds were beginning to move across its face. If I was going to get a shot, it had to be soon. I dashed downstairs, grabbed the el cheapo digital camera, bounded back up to the kitchen, removed the window screen, flung open the window and had time for two quick shots before clouds hid the moon. A proper camera with a long lens might have been ideal for sharpness and size, but it would not have produced the impressionist image that emerged with only a bit of editing manipulation.

All right, it’s not a great picture, but it’s an excuse to listen to Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie.

When I called this an irregular series, I wasn’t kidding. Click here for the previous installment.

Mort Weiss identified himself in a comment here as “the world’s greatest out-of-work Jewish bebop clarinet player.” That may be, but he found work one night not long ago at Steamers jazz club in the Los Angeles area. Weiss led a band with Sam Most, tenor sax and flute; Ron Eschete, guitar; Luther Hughes, bass; and Roy McCurdy, drums. The tune is Jerome Kern’s “I’m Old Fashioned” at a lovely, relaxed tempo. Most’s two tenor choruses channeling Lester Young are as enjoyable as watching him dig Eschete.

Rifftides does not make it a practice to observe birthdays of jazz artists. That could be a full-time job. Once in a while we make an exception. This is one. Larry Young was born on October 7, 1940. He took the organ beyond Jimmy Smith’s earthy approach and Don Patterson’s piano-style into the use of modes. Young sometimes employed the instrument’s capacity for overtones to produce otherworldly effects. With Tony Williams Lifetime, Miles Davis on Bitches Brew and Jimi Hendrix on Nine to the Universe, Young was an experimenter with fusion. In this piece from Unity, an album that sells well 46 years after it was made, Young is experimental only in negotiating the challenging chords of Woody Shaw’s “The Moontrane.” Shaw is on trumpet, Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Elvin Jones on drums.

Larry Young died on March 3, 1978 of untreated pneumonia. I wish that this remarkable musician had taken better care of himself.

In 1963, Dick Gibson (1926-1998) threw a party in Denver, where he lived. An investment banker who expanded his fortune when he founded the Water Pik company, Gibson invited well-heeled friends to mingle with his favorite mainstream musicians and listen to them play. He ran his jazz parties for three decades and hired a cross section of artists that included James Moody, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Ross Tompkins, Victor Feldman, Budd Johnson, Trummy Young and Cliff Leeman, to name a few. Gibson’s parties were so successful that they inspired similar events across the country, from Clearwater Beach, Florida, to Sun Valley, Idaho.

One of the newer parties on the circuit is Jazz at Newport, held each fall since 2002 in its namesake, a town of 10,000 on the Oregon Coast. Newport’s long sandy beach, seen here, didn’t get much attention from the several hundred listeners who attended the mini-festival last weekend; a packed schedule kept them occupied. Presented by the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, Jazz at Newport is booked, organized and straw-bossed by Holly Hofmann, who found time to play her flute only twice. She put together a roster of 23 musicians of various persuasions. Their mutual goal did not, for the most part, encompass complexity or freedom from harmony, rhythm and structure. Farthest out was the Sunday morning session by Weber Iago’s adventurous Chamber Jazz Project, and it had jazz time at its heart even as it verged on textures of modern classical music.

The festivities began on Friday evening with the first appearance by drummer Jeff Hamilton’s longtime trio with pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty. Their opening set established a standard of cohesion and hard swing, Hamilton astonishing the audience with the variety of his playing with wire brushes. In the mix-and-match spirit of the party, throughout the weekend the three would drift in and out of other combinations of players.

At a Saturday morning panel, an audience member asked how musicians who have never played together know what to do when they are combined in a spontaneous jam session.

“Jazz has a common language,” Hamilton said. “We agree on a tune, a key and a tempo. Experienced players usually adjust to one another more or less instantly.”

Allow me to expand on that with two passages from, coincidentally, the “Common Language” chapter of a book I wrote:

Pure improvisation born of absolution inspiration, a solo created out of whole cloth, is likely to be as remarkable as it is rare. Most solos are combinations of inspiration and spare parts. The creative process of improvisation is selective, and what is selected is influenced by a number of elements including the music’s harmonic structure, the tempo, rhythmic qualities, the musician’s fellow players, and his memory. His brain has a stockpile of musical knowledge, general and specific. The specifics include phrases from his own experience and that of others. They are pressed into service as quotations and worked into the new performance. Sometimes they are inserted piecemeal, sometimes merely alluded to.

Mutual access to a community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties. In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

If I had written that today rather than 20-odd years ago, the word “his” might not have popped up, especially if I’d written it after hearing Anat Cohen, Kristin Korb and Holly Hofmann at Newport. Cohen joined bassist Luty, guitarist Howard Alden and drummer Lewis Nash. Following a relaxed “Shiny Stockings,” they tore into “Limehouse Blues,” which featured a blistering soprano-guitar unison passage that Alden and Cohen had worked out in their New York encounters. Ellington’s “The Mooche” (clarinet) and Monk’s “Ask Me Now” (tenor) preceded one of the Brazilian choros (clarinet) that Cohen has been favoring lately. Riding on the energy of the rhythm section, she had remarkable power and command on all three horns. The common language principle was in full force among these four.

Pianist Monty Alexander’s first set reunited him with Hamilton, the drummer on Alexander’s celebrated 1976 live trio recording at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Hassan Shakur (formerly known as J.J. Wiggins) providing bass lines, they opened with the signature tune from Montreux, “Night Mist Blues.” It took them about three seconds to recapture their rapport and contagious swing and the audience about six seconds to roar their approval as they recognized the tune. The good feeling expanded through a six-tune set that included “Come Fly With Me” and “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” recalling Alexander’s association with Frank Sinatra. Shakur’s bass solos captivated the audience, not for the last time during the weekend.

The first of two late-night jam sessions took place in a long, narrow restaurant at the Shilo Inn on the Newport waterfront. The sound system crashed, so the set went mostly acoustic except for some jury-rigged miking for Korb’s vocals. Her colleagues were Terell Stafford, trumpet; Howard Alden, guitar; and Lewis Nash, drums. They opened with “I’ll Close My Eyes,” then did Sonny Rollins’ “Pent-up House,” Stafford unleashing his first torrents of high notes that were to have the audience applauding and cheering him all weekend. The subtlety of his intriguing alternate harmonies on Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me” got less reaction from the audience, but plenty from the musicians. Korb’s vocal on “Take The ‘A’ Train” featured her clever lyrics and on “My Romance,” her quick thinking. The illumination flickered and dimmed as she approached the part of the lyric that goes, “Nor a dance to a constantly surprising refrain,” so she instantly substituted “…surprising light change” and got a laugh. The session ended with Nash not only drumming but also scatting the blues as Alden and Korb provided propulsion. Alden and Stafford took it out with the classic “Walkin’.”

The Saturday morning panel of Hamilton, Korb and Stafford had Hofmann as moderator and participant. They tackled the perennial question: is there a young audience for jazz? “Yes,” Hamilton said, “but not here. They can’t afford it. You have the money to come here for a few days,” he told the audience, average age well above 50. “They don’t.” He said that the youngsters are listening in new clubs that cater to them. Stafford said he is encouraged by the numbers of young people attending festivals like Lionel Hampton in Idaho and Port Townsend in Washington. As for inner city kids, the consensus was that clinics and courses are available to them, but to learn about jazz, they have to want to learn, and they are fixated on hip-hop. If that’s a generalization, it’s not much of one.

The Saturday afternoon sets began with each of three musicians playing alone. Hendelman did a medley of tunes by Ray Noble that ended with a fleet “Cherokee.” Korb’s bass solo was on “Green Dolphin Street,” and so was her vocal; she accompanied herself, occasionally drifting into bass-voice unison lines. Hamilton, Alexander and Portland vibraharpist Mike Horsfall each played an unaccompanied solo. In the duo segment that followed, Alden and Cohen opened and closed with pieces from the 1920s. Cohen was on soprano for Duke Ellington’s “Jubilee Stomp” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Shreveport Stomp.” The middle of their set included Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages,” the guitarist and the clarinetist floating through the famous melody as if on a cloud. Stafford and pianist Mike Wofford followed with “Taking a Chance on Love.” There was a lot of Clifford Brown in the beginning of Stafford’s solo, then growls and note bending by a trumpeter who makes judicious use of his flexibility and range on the horn. If his playing was often spectacular at Newport, the flash was never at the expense of taste or musicality. Wofford’s and Stafford’s counterpoint chorus and tag ending on “Close Your Eyes” stay in the mind, as does Wofford’s rich 16-bar solo on “Old Folks,” which led to a suspended ending complete with a “Country Gardens” quote from Stafford. Remember—spare parts are allowed.

In trio sets, Korb took Luty’s place in the Hamilton Trio, singing and playing and locking up nicely with the drummer and Hendelman. Luty then joined Howard Alden and Lewis Nash, opening with Bud Powell’s “Strictly Confidential.” Using brushes, Nash was flying through the breaks. Alden led the trio through two pieces by one of his guitar heroes, Barney Kessel. In a three-generation guitar continuum, Kessel’s “I Remember Django” honors one of his inspirations. Alden captured the spirit and sometimes the letter of both of his predecessors. On “64 Bars on Wilshire,” taken at warp speed, Alden simply wailed, powered by Luty’s and Nash’s teamwork.

The Rifftides staff thanks the veteran Newport photographer Nancy Jane Reid for letting us use her pictures of some of the sessions. There’s more coming about Jazz at Newport, but for now, I gotta get me some Zs (© Dave Frishberg).

Tomorrow, the Rifftides staff plus one will hit the road to Oregon. The first stop is Portland, where we’ll hear Dave Frishberg and Rebecca Kilgore at the restaurant called Touché. In this album, they concentrated on Frank Loesser. Advance word is that at the Touché, they will tackle some of Irving Berlin’s more obscure songs.

Then, we head southwest to Newport, a coastal town of about 10,000 whose main occupations are in tourism, fishing and wood products. It is the home of the other Newport jazz festival, the small, intimate one. Among the musicians at Newport Jazz 2011 will be the Jeff Hamilton Trio, Terell Stafford, Holly Hofmann, Mike Wofford, Monty Alexander, Hassan Shakur, Anat Cohen, Howard Alden and Kristin Korb. To see the full list and schedule, go here. I look forward to again hearing the PDX Jazz Quintet, aka PDXV, and my first exposure to the Weber Iago/David Valdez Chamber Jazz Project. I’ve been asked to say a few words now and then in the course of the weekend. Schedule permitting, I hope to work in a bit of blogging.

On the heels of the announcement that he will be a Kennedy Center honoree later this year, Sonny Rollins appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS. He discussed his career, his philosophy and why he feels that the Medal of Arts is not going to him alone.

“It’s the people who came before me,” he told Smiley. “When I accept this honor, it’s for Count Basie, who got one. It’s for Duke Ellington, who didn’t get one. It’s for Lester Young, who didn’t get one. It’s for Thelonious Monk, who didn’t get one. So, I’m standing up there and I say, ‘Thank you for this honor, thank you. I appreciate it. But I understand that I’m them. We’re talking about this music now. I appreciate it for everybody who bled and died and suffered and still made this great music come about.’”

Here’s the video of the entire 24-minute segment.

This is short notice—sorry about that—but on his Jazz Northwest at 1:00 pm PDT today, Jim Wilke is presenting the Jeff Hamilton Trio with Tamir Hendelman and Christof Luty. Wilke recorded them this summer at the Port Townsend Centrum Jazz Festival. To hear Hamilton and company, go here and click on “Listen Live.” If you are in the Seattle-Tacoma area, you can listen on KPLU-FM at 88.5 If you miss the broadcast, the program will be in Wilke’s archive at this address.

Rifftides reader Svetlana Ilyicheva writes from Moscow:

Maybe it will interest you (I learned about it about a week ago myself):

In summer 1967 there was an international film festival in Russia. An American actress, Sandy Dennis, came to Moscow escorted by her husband bari saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.* Gerry was immediately taken to the Youth Cafe, a” hotbed” of jazz in Moscow. (BTW, Leonard Feather wrote about this cafe in his book). A jam session was arranged where Gerry had to play alto, as they hadn’t found a decent baritone and borrowed a brand-new golden Selmer from one of the sax players. If you click the link and scroll the text until you see the photo of Gerry (а dark figure close to Gerry is a popular Russian sax player, Alexei Kozlov. The photo is from his collection). Just above the photo you will see an MP3 of a recording where Gerry played with KM-Quartet. (As the recording belongs to the collection it is not allowed to be downloaded). It had certainly been a glorious moment for the Russian jazzmen of that time.

The recording above the one I described is that of “KM-Quartet” with Vagif Sadikhov at piano, whose 65th birthday is going to be celebrated by the Moscow jazz community and whose talent was appreciated by many a jazzmen ( Benny Green, Johnny Griffin among them).

Here is the link: http://jazzru.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/vagif-sadikhov-65/

The unique recording belongs to the collection of the late Arkady Petrov, musical expert, one of the elders of Russian jazz journalism and the first Soviet Jazz broadcaster.

*(Mulligan and Sandy Dennis were together for more than ten years but never married—DR)

Frank Driggs, a tireless jazz researcher and historian who collected photographs familiar to millions, died this week at the age of 81. In the 1950s as a producer for Columbia Records, Driggs oversaw the organizing and reissuing of historically important recordings by Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa. In 1991, he won a Grammy for Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings, the recorded work of the seminal blues singer and guitarist. He began documenting the history of jazz at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University when Marshall Stearns was its director.

As a collector, Driggs gathered more than 100,000 photographs that he cataloged primarily in his head. He was able to retrieve them when academic institutions, publishers and authors needed them. Photographs from his archive fill the book Black Beauty, White Heat, which he co-authored with Harris Lewine. Several of the photos in my biography of Paul Desmond are from the Driggs collection. His friend and associate Donna Ranieri told The Associated Press that Driggs was found dead of natural causes in his apartment in Manhattan on Tuesday.

Tomorrow is the first day of fall in the northern hemisphere. Coincidentally, Emil Viklický, who lives in an eastern precinct of the hemisphere, recently alerted me to new video of a performance last spring at the Prague Castle. Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, hosted a tribute to Miles Davis. It was a concert in the Jazz na HradÄ› series that the president initiated, with Viklický’s help, at the Czech counterpart of the White House.

The musicians are Viklický, piano; Jon Faddis, trumpet; Jaroslav Jakubovic, baritone saxophone; Tom Barney, bass; and Lennie White, drums. The tune is—what else?—”Autumn Leaves.” Following the performance, a bevy of beautiful Czech women presents flowers to the musicians, President Klaus goes on stage to offer his thanks, and White speaks for the band. It’s a class act, all the way around.

For another performance from the same concert, and background about Klaus’s concert series, go here.

Pat Metheny and Larry Grenadier and a truckload of equipment are on a 26-city tour. They warmed up the other night with a first stop at The Seasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington. The tour will end in mid-October with a week at the Blue Note in New York City.

The equipment played a major role in Metheny’s and Grenadier’s two-concert evening at The Seasons, but their most satisfying moments came when they dialed down the amplification, ignored the panoply of digitally driven instruments occupying the back of the stage and achieved the intimacy that Metheny said was his goal for the music. His solo on the piece that began the second concert, “All the Things You Are,” ranks with the best playing I’ve ever heard from him. His final chorus of ascending chromatic figures was an expression of sheer joy.

The guitarist’s name and reputation were the draw that nearly filled the hall twice. It may be that Grenadier was unknown to most of the audience when they walked in. By the end of the evening, the energy, musicianship and power of his bass playing made it unlikely that they will forget him. Introducing Grenadier, Metheny said, “He’s the only one I’d do this kind of tour with.” Grenadier managed to retain the woody acoustic essence of his instrument despite excessive amplification in a hall with near-perfect natural sound properties. The melodic inventiveness of his solos often matched Metheny’s. His rhythmic drive supplied consistent excitement. The blues groove of “Soul Cowboy” led Metheny to exquisite subtlety in his single-note lines. The nuances continued in his quiet accompaniment of a Grenadier bass solo that moved some listeners to audible “Yeahs” and a few indiscreet whoops.

Exotica reigned in the first concert with Metheny’s unaccompanied performance of “The Sound of Water” on an elaborate custom instrument. George Van Eps used to call his guitar a lap piano. Metheny could fairly describe his 47-string guitar as a lap orchestra. Darned if he didn’t approximate the sound of water.

After speaking about his long love of music-making through electricity—”My first instrument was a wall plug”—Metheny announced that he and Grenadier would indulge in pure improvisation. They began as a duo but were soon joined by an illuminated device that flashed and sounded gongs in rhythm. Then with swift drama, the road crew lifted black covers off an astonishing array of equipment—an accordion, a marimba, a glockenspiel, sets of cymbals, a bass drum, a conga drum, a snare drum, ranks of jugs filled with varying levels of mineral water, and a few things it was impossible to see from the cheap seats. It was the orchestrion, or Metheny’s computerized variant of it, controlled through solenoids actuated by his guitar and several foot pedals.

Well, it didn’t work too well at the first concert. At the second, all of the synapses of the electronic brain were firing and we got a wild few minutes of rhythmic and visual display complete with echo, looping repetition, a percussion fiesta and accordion sounds that sometimes approximated trumpets. In one section, as Metheny wailed away, Grenadier used his bow to set a bass riff. It was fascinating and funny, a kind of musical vaudeville. When it ended, Metheny said, “That’s impossible to explain, so we’re just gonna keep playing.” And they did. In the course of the evening, they visited several of Metheny’s greatest hits, among them “James,” “Bright Size Life” and “Farmer’s Trust.”

What Metheny said would be the closing number turned out to be a highlight of both concerts. It was Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma,” with no orchestrion supplements, fine solos from both musicians and a tag ending in which they anticipated one another beautifully. There was an anonymous-sounding Metheny solo encore, but it was the pure music of “James,” “Con Alma, “All the Things You Are,” “Autumn Leaves” and a few other pieces that lingered in the mind as the orchestrion entertainment extravaganza faded away.

In this video from the 2009 Umbria Jazz festival in Italy, Metheny and Grenadier play the kind of music they made in the quieter moments at The Seasons. If you don’t understand Italian, you may want to fast-forward to 1:15

If you’re interested in knowing more about the orchestrion, go here for Metheny’s explanation and demonstration.

In his newest column, Mr. P.C., the jazz advice columnist, tackles the controversial issue of jazz as a disappearing resource. In answer to a question, he offers possible solutions, including this one:

But conservation alone won’t be enough; we must turn to alternative, renewable sources of jazz. These, of course, are colleges and conservatories, which efficiently convert tuition dollars into vast numbers of jazz performers and composers able to crank out low-grade jazz in tremendous quantity. There’s no end to the number of programs our planet can accommodate, and no limit to the number of notes their graduates will produce.

To explore the problem further with Mr. P.C., you can find him on All About Jazz, but if you go to his Facebook page, you get the bonus of a realistic drawing of him consulting a troubled musician. In the column he also addresses a drummer’s counting habit and the dilemma of a musician’s wife looking for a way to communicate with her husband.

We have it on reasonably good authority that under the name Bill Anschell, Mr. P.C. moonlights as a pianist. You may see a resemblance to the man in the drawing. Here, soprano saxophonist Brent Jensen accompanies Anschell, and vice versa.

For an account of a previous Anschell-Jensen encounter, go here.

Steve Cerra (pictured), the proprietor of Jazz Profiles, found himself desperate for material and put me in an unaccustomed position——on the answering end of an interview. The results are posted on his excellent blog, which you can reach by clicking here. If you make it through that piece, you’ll arrive at Steve’s news posts about Ernestine Anderson and Carmel Jones.

When we posted the Rifftides observance last month of Bill Evans’ birthday, a reader suggested that we follow up on the anniversary of his death, which was September 15, 1980. Here is Evans with his last trio—Marc Johnson, bass; Joe LaBarbera, drums—playing the piece he wrote in memory of his father.