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The question comes up every now and then. Here’s the answer from a posting in the early days of Rifftides, July 12, 2005.
Name That Blog
Now that you ask, the name Rifftides was inspired by a 1945 Coleman Hawkins piece, “Rifftide.” The tune was part of the celebrated 1945 Hollywood Stampede session that included trumpeter Howard McGhee, one of the bebop kiddies Hawk nurtured. Thelonious Monk had played with Hawkins the year before. Monk later recorded the tune and called it “Hackensack” Either way, it’s based on the harmonic structure of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” but copyright law doesn’t cover chord changes, and George Gershwin’s estate earned no royalties. Nor can titles be copyrighted, so I stole Hawkins’s and pluralized it.

When Concord Music acquired the Fantasy, Inc. complex of labels a few years ago, the deal stirred apprehension that records preserving a wide swath of jazz history would disappear into the recording industry black hole known as Out Of Print. Concord took over the Fantasy, Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary and Pablo catalogues. More than three years later, as record companies struggle against the tide of the digital revolution or try to learn to navigate in it, listeners are still concerned that classic albums will sink out of sight. One of those listeners is Rifftides reader Andrew Dowd, who wrote:

Do you know why the owners of Fantasy Records (Ralph Kaffel??) sold out to Concord a few years back? As a lifelong jazz CD and LP collector, I was saddened to see that Fantasy sold.. Fantasy was one of the last jazz labels to keep a large and full catalog; they never discontinued anything. However, over the past couple years Concord has decimated the Fantasy catalog. The Riverside catalog has been almost completely wiped out – save for the classic releases by the major legends (Sonny Rollins, Monk, Wes Montgomery, etc). I think it’s a crying shame that Concord has discontinued most of the CDs by the lesser-known artists who recorded for Riverside. The Contemporary catalog was also greatly reduced in size. The Prestige catalog has fared much better, happily. I realize that opinions like mine are nothing new in the jazz world, but perhaps you might have the time and inclination to comment.

I asked Nick Phillips, the Concord vice president for jazz and catalog A&R (artists and repertoire) to respond to Mr. Dowd. His answer addresses not just the Concord-Fantasy question, but also the practicalities raising challenges to the entire recorded music business as it has been practiced for a century.

I can’t speak for Ralph Kaffel and Saul Zaentz as to why they sold Fantasy. But, I can hazard a guess that Ralph–who was running the Fantasy operation and was of “retirement age”–simply decided to retire and enjoy life free from the day-to-day stresses of running a record company.
Regarding certain releases in the catalog no longer being available in physical CD form, I have a couple of comments:
The record business in general has changed drastically since the time that Fantasy was acquired by Concord. Remember Tower Records? Gone. The retail stores that remain continue to reduce the number of CD titles that they carry. So, out of necessity not choice, the distribution and delivery method continues to lean more and more toward the digital arena (and not physical CD) these days, as there are fewer and fewer retail stores stocking CDs, especially the deep jazz catalog titles. And there are additional costs to continuing to keep an album available in the physical CD format (manufacturing minimum reorder quantity and cost, warehousing costs, shipping costs, returns from retailers, etc.)
Most titles in our catalog that were/are available on CD are available for digital download (via emusic.com, for example). So, we don’t consider titles that are at least available for digital download–and available for any and all that care to hear them–to be “out of print.”

For a related story from the Rifftides archive, click here

The current subject in Steve Cerra’s Jazz Profiles blog is Jack Tracy, a former editor of Down Beat magazine and producer of important records during a yeasty period of Chicago’s jazz history. His anecdotes about encounters with musicians include disclosure of an aspect of Dizzy Gillespie’s personality that is rarely emphasized. To read it, go here and scroll down to “Jimmy Yancey Memorial.” The piece includes a rare photograph reinforcing an essential point in Tracy’s story — that before he helped evolve bebop, Gillespie developed in an older tradition and never lost his respect for it.

To read a Rifftides post with other remembrance of Dizzy, click here.

Being on holiday, as our British friends say, does not preclude a minor post from the road. The first leg of our trip south ended with a drive through the mountains of southern Oregon between Klamath Falls and Ashland. As we negotiated the hills and curves of Oregon Route 66 up and down Mount Parker, we had sunshine, hail, snow and wind, separately and all at once. The accompanying picture was made in less interesting weather. Around every bend was a spectacle, cliffs hanging over us, deep valleys in cloud and sunshine below us.
Ashland is famous for its Shakespeare Festival. In our family, it is equally famous for Chateaulin, one of the best French restaurants outside of France. As our dinner was winding down, we heard wafting in from an adjacent dining room a tenor saxophone accompanied by bass and piano. The tune was “Sweet Lorraine.” Inquiry disclosed that the players, all Ashlanders, play at Chateaulin every Tuesday evening. The tenor player is Fritz Hunnicutt, the pianist Ben Gault, the bassist Michael Barth – no relation to Benny of The Mastersounds. They played standards, with no one overreaching or underachieving. Simple, as Red Mitchell reminded us, isn’t easy. Before we had to move on, a 17-year-old singer named Calysta Rupert-Anderson did a couple of songs. She was fine, too. Jazz is where you find it, even in a small town (albeit a very hip small town) in the Siskiyou Mountains.

Mike Harris is the Bill Evans devotee who surreptitiously recorded the Evans trio performances that comprise the music in the eight-disc boxed set Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. Mr. Harris is a classically trained pianist who, long before he became addicted to Evans, learned to play the works of Sergei Rachmaninoff. In this article for Rifftides, he discloses that Evans, too, was a Rachmaninoff fan.

(coupled on the DVD with Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, recorded some years later) together with superb recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Grieg concertos in particular (which are available, along with the Beethoven Emperor and Brahms Second, on separate discs in this series), reveal the young pianist at the very peak of his powers. His use of rhythmic and dynamic accents, along with his rather remarkable hand-mechanics, are but two of the treats awaiting pianists and others who avail themselves of the opportunity to view these live concerts. God bless whoever was behind the retrieval and release of these important historical and musical documents.
The pianist is accompanied on all these discs (other than the solo ones, one of which includes an unforgettable rendition of the original version of the Second Piano Sonata of Rachmaninoff) by the great Russian conductor Kirill Kondrashin, whose orchestral support is perfectly attuned and balanced to the pianists’s conception.
One of the interesting stories surrounding this performance of the Third Concerto has it that Sviatoslav Richter (who along with Emil Gilels was serving as a judge for this competition) became so irate at the low scores that he observed his fellow judges awarding Cliburn’s efforts in the early competition (after all, this First International show was intended to display to the world the Soviet Union’s cultural superiority), that he began awarding all Mr. Cliburn’s performances a 10, while awarding all the Soviet pianists scores of zero.
The story goes on to relate how two of the greatest pianists in history, Gilels and Richter, had to go to Premier Khruschev (who by the way is shown, along with Mikoyan, applauding at the end of the video) for permission to give the first-place award to the young American, to which Mr. Khruschev is said to have replied, “If he is the best, then give it to him.” You can buy that version or not, but the end result was certainly as it should have been.
At any rate, political shenanigans aside, the execution of this enormous work (to which I confess a certain affinity, having wrestled with it’s humongous difficulties and sublime beauties for several of the best years of my life) is utterly remarkable. While the 50-year old video-quality could be better, the audio is quite good and neither detracts one whit from the experience.
I am reminded of a statement by the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman to the effect that: “One doesn’t LEARN a Rachmaninoff concerto, one LIVES it!” And amen to that.
All DVD’s in the VAI series are available on Amazon; the Rachmaninoff Concerto DVD, in particular, can be found here

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The Complete Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Recordings (Fantasy). The first CD of the set reissues Fantasy’s The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album from 1975 and Improv’s Together Again from 1976. It also has two previously unissued songs from the Together Again sessions, “Who Can I Turn To” and a rollicking run through Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing” In which Bennett blends into the end of Evans’ solo as if the singer were an extension of the piano. Bennett’s delighted laughter at the end of the take symbolizes the rapport between the two. Oddly, in his excellent booklet notes Will Friedwald barely mentions the track.
The second disc contains 20 alternate takes from Together Again and five from The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album. There is nothing in these alternates to suggest that the wrong takes were selected for the original releases, but they are by no means failed attempts. In the case of “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” the two alternates give dramatic evidence of Billie Holiday’s influence on Bennett. Throughout, the alternates provide insights into the variety of Evans’s inexhaustible melodic creativity. Bennett and Evans together are an art song equivalent of Dieter Fischer-Dieskau’s and Gerald Moore’s artistry with German lieder, but we have the added element of Evans’ genius at improvisation.
Daryl Sherman, New O’leans (Audiophile). Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the Crescent City inspired Sherman to record this collection of songs, but it goes beyond the post-disaster blues to touch on many of the aspects that endear New Orleans to the world. Harold Arlen’s “Ill Wind” was an obvious choice. Louis Armstrong’s “Red Cap,” Irving Berlin’s “Shaking the Blues Away,” Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” and Dave Frishberg’s “Eloise” may seem unexpected companions in a New Orleans tribute until you hear how Sherman and her colleagues use them to evoke the city. Rhodes Spedale’s “S’Mardi Gras” needs no enhancement in that regard; it is a tour of Fat Tuesday locations and emotions. Guitarist James Chirillo and trumpeter Connie Jones are Sherman’s best-known sidemen. Reed man Tom Fischer and bassist Al Bernard, misidentified as “Menard,” are in the same league. Sherman plays piano on this drummerless date. The infectious good cheer in her voice will make you grin, except when she makes your eyes moist with “Mr Bojangles” and “Wendell’s Cat.”
Joe Sardaro, Protégé (Catch My Drift). The current short supply of effective male singers with jazz leanings makes the release of a new recording by Sardaro a welcome event. The market is not saturated with his albums. His last one, Lost in the Stars, was a 1986 LP with a combo headed by Shelly Manne. It has never been reissued on CD. The Boston-area Winiker Brothers Quintet accompanying him on the new CD is less widely known but excellent. Sardaro employs his light baritone to pleasant effect in a set of 16 well-chosen songs, some of them rarely performed. I haven’t heard anyone do Charles La Vere’s “Mis’ry and the Blues” since Jack Teagarden’s 1961 recording. It’s interesting to hear it in the company of songs by, among others, Jobim, Kern, Ellington and McCartney. Sardaro is touching in his revival of the Arthur Schwartz-Dorothy Fields rarity “Alone Too Long.” As I wrote in a review of his 1986 album, in the absence of a spectacular vocal instrument, Sardaro uses taste, swing, diction and lyric interpretation. The CD’s title recognizes Sardaro’s debt to Anita O’Day, who encouraged him when he was young and with whom he kept a close relationship for the rest of her life.
Mel Tormé, California Suite (Fresh Sound). This reissue has both versions of Torme’s suite honoring his adopted state, the 1949 recording for Capitol and the 1957 remake on Bethlehem. Tormé fashioned his words and music into a cantata for orchestra, his voice and his backing vocal quartet The Melltones. The 1949 recording with Hal Mooney’s orchestra was well received, but Tormé was never completely satisfied with it. He recruited arranger Marty Paich, with whose dek-tette he had recorded LPs now recognized as minor masterpieces. They revised the work, adding interest to the harmonic structures and investing it with jazz vitality that was underemphasized in the earlier version. As splendid a singer as Tormé was the first time around, by ’57 his voice had taken on added burnish, depth and intensity. Both versions are impressive, but the later one has improvements to the lyrics and an increased rhythmic sensibility. As the first one ends, the listener may wonder why Tormé wanted to take another run at it. When the second version ends, you’ll know.

Carol Fredette, Everything In Time (Soundbrush). This is Fredette’s first CD in more than a decade, and worth waiting for. I haven’t heard anyone do the Bing Crosby feature “Love Thy Neighbor” since John Coltrane in the 1950s. Fredette sings it with joy in her voice to equal the whooping exuberance of Trane’s solo. Her laughing, quacking take on the bossa nova classic “O Pato” is just one more of 15 reasons to admire this classy collection.
John Sheridan, Swing Is Still The King, featuring Rebecca Kilgore (Arbors). Kilgore, one of the purest of singers, is on more than half the tracks, a fine idea. Pianist Sheridan’s dandy mid-sized band includes tenor saxophonist Scott Robinson, trombonist Dan Barrett and drummer Jake Hanna.
Ann Hampton Calloway, At Last (Telarc). The customary question raised in most reviews of Calloway is whether she is a jazz singer or a cabaret performer. That’s a waste of space. She has a big, rich voice and sings beautifully. What else matters? Pianist Ted Rosenthal, bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Victor Lewis are her rhythm section. Marvin Stamm, Rodney Jones and Wycliffe Gordon are among the guest soloists.
Diana Krall, Quiet Nights (Verve). It’s a familiar phenomenon, the assumption by elements of the jazz cognoscenti that if a jazz artist achieves wide success, she must have watered down the product. Krall is their current favorite target, a position formerly filled by Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Chick Corea, among others. She has never been a great singer or a great jazz pianist, merely very good, and appealing in both categories. Claus Ogerman’s arrangements suit her nicely in this bewitchingly low-key recital. Slipping in a “bonus” cover of the Bee Gee’s 1971 tearjerker hit “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” wasn’t the best idea Krall–or her producer–might have come up with. The rest of the CD is fine, with a touching treatment of Jobim’s “Quiet Nights” (“Corcovado”).
Kelley Johnson, Home (Sapphire). Johnson shines in her singing, composing and arranging on this fully realized recording, a balanced blend of the familiar and the daring. She has prime assistance from her pianist husband John Hansen on some tracks and Geoffrey Keezer on others. Johnson’s and Hansen’s duet on “Where Do You Start” is a highlight. Ingrid Jensen and John Wikan contribute an arrangement that teams Johnson’s voice with Jay Thomas’s trumpet and Keezer’s piano to channel “Moon River” through new harmonic territory. This collection deserves and rewards repeated listening.
To see Singers, Part 1, go here.

Jim Wilke, the proprietor of Jazz After Hours, writes:

I thought you’d like to know I’m featuring several selections by Bud Shank in each hour of tonight’s program. Music ranges from his earliest World Pacific and Pacific Jazz records in the ’50s through his latest issued recordings. Please pass the word to others you think would be interested.

For a list of the 79 stations that carry Wilke”s syndicated program, go here. If you are in none of their listening areas, you can hear him on KPLU-FM’s streaming internet feed. Follow this link and click on “Listen Live.” The broadcast is from midnight to 4:30 a.m. PDT, 3:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m EDT, Saturday, April 11.
Shank, a major alto saxophonist, flutist, band leader and educator, died a week ago. To see the Rifftides item about his passing and his importance, go here
Kim Matas has a fine profile of Shank in her “Life Stories” column in today’s Arizona Star, his hometown paper.

I’ve been sampling CDs by singers. For the most part, the CDs are new, but not all of the singers are. As an example, take Jimmy Rushing…please.
Jimmy Rushing, The Scene: Live In New York (High Note). Rushing became famous with the Count Basie band of the late 1930s and was with Basie until 1950. The cliché most often applied to him is “blues shouter,” and he was a magnificent one. The designation sells him short, though. Rushing was also a superlative singer of standard songs, particularly of what used to be called rhythm ballads. In the 1960s and nearly to the time of his death in 1972, He sang frequently with tenor saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. They appeared in other places, but most often at the Half Note in lower Manhattan. One of my imperishable memories is of Rushing, Sims, Cohn, pianist Dave Frishberg and a bassist and drummer jammed onto the Half Note’s little bandstand having the time of their lives, spreading joy. Most often, the drummer was Mousey Alexander. Frequently, the bassist was Major Holley. Alexander and Holley are on this album. Frishberg is the pianist throughout, although the liner notes and the tray card indicate that there is an additional pianist.
Alan Grant of New York’s WABC Radio regularly broadcast from the Half Note in the mid-sixties. His shows often featured Rushing and company. There is little question that these tracks come from those remote broadcasts, but the record company avoids identifying the club or the source of the tapes. That is of small moment, perhaps, except that this album is not only entertaining, it also documents a time and place in jazz history and should provide the facts. The CD includes two instrumentals by the Sims-Cohn group, Zoot’s “Red Door” and Al’s “The Note,” the latter misidentified as “It’s Noteworthy.”
Discographical inaccuracies aside, music is the name of the game, and the game is played no better than Rushing and his companions play it here. Rushing is in great voice and high spirits. Cohn, Sims and the rhythm section reciprocate. The rescue and release of these performances is good news.
The Scene is a fitting companion to Rushing’s last recording, The You And Me That Used To Be, an 1972 RCA Bluebird album with Sims, Cohn, Frishberg, Budd Johnson, Ray Nance, Milt Hinton and Mel Lewis playing Frishberg’s perfectly tailored arrangements. The bad news about The You And Me That Used To Be is that it’s out of print and selling for as much as $88.45 on Amazon. The good news is that It’s available for $1.65 as an MP3 download. Maybe there’s something to this digital commerce stuff after all.
Here is Jimmy Rushing in the 1960s accompanying himself in one of his favorite blues. This is from Ralph J. Gleason’s Jazz Casual public television series.

Briefly: Other Vocal CDs
Connie Evingson: Little Did I Dream (Minnehaha Music). The subtitle is Songs By Dave Frishberg. He traveled to his native Minnesota to record with Evingson, a fine vocalist. Their Twin Cities colleagues include his old St. Paul pal Dave Karr, an accomplished saxophonist. Evingson brings her individuality and spark to fourteen of Frishberg’s songs. Among them are “Zoot Walks In,” “My Attorney Bernie” and a touching treatment of “Listen Here.”
Retta Christie with David Evans and Dave Frishberg (Retta). Christie is a country singer who leads her own band in Oregon. Here, however, she teams with Frishberg and Evans in a strange-bedfellows set of greater- and lesser-known songs that work surprisingly well together. Her voice is light, her delivery straightforward. Frishberg gets plenty of solo time, as does Evans, one of the great undercover secrets among tenor saxophonists. There’s no drummer. Christie, Frishberg and Evans don’t need one. If you’ve always wanted to hear “The Thrill is Gone” and “Ridin’ Down the Canyon” under the same cover, this is the one for you.
John Pizzarelli with The Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra, Dear Mr. Sinatra (Telarc). What, another Sinatra tribute? Yes, and beautifully executed by the Clayton-Hamiltons and Pizzarelli being his musical self singing songs associated with Sinatra. He also plays satisfying guitar solos, incorporating that voice-single string unison voodoo that he does so well. The arrangements, mostly by John Clatyton, are subtle, only now and then hinting at Nelson Riddle. This has been sitting in my CD stacks unheard for a couple of years. I wish that I had put it on sooner.
Lisa Sokolov, A Quiet Thing (Laughing Horse). Intriguing in her eccentricity, Sokolov takes flying leaps at time, diction, intonation and interpretation. She usually lands right side up. She’s a vocal actress and a chance-taker well matched with adventurous musicians including bassist Cameron Brown, pianist John DiMartino and drummer Gerry Hemingway.

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Ethan Iverson’s recollection of that quaint piece of audio gear, the reel-to-reel tape recorder, triggered even older thoughts from the eminent bassist and anecdotist Bill Crow.

My memories of early equipment go clear back to the Edison cylinder record player. My dad bought one (used) around 1933. It came with a box of cylinders, maybe a dozen, from which I learned a couple of Harry Lauder songs, some vaudeville tunes, and a song called “The Last Long Mile,” the lyrics of which I remember almost entirely. It was a slightly humorous complaint from a guy marching with the army, and I found out from Doug’s book many years later, that it was written by Paul Desmond’s father! I wish I had found that out while Paul was still with us… I could have cracked him up by singing it to him.
One of my mother’s pupils came by the house one day with a portable disc recorder, on which I engraved a child’s voice singing “On The Good Ship Lollipop.” My first personal record player (1943) was a tiny plastic turntable that I could wire into my table radio, and on which I played my beginning collection of jazz 78s.
When I got out of the army in 1949, I bought the first available tape recorder, a Brush Soundmirror, which had a fatal flaw: the tape went at too sharp an angle around a capstan, and that angle increased as the tape wound off the reel, causing drag that sometimes slowed the tape down. Their next model featured a straight through passage for the tape, but I waited until Wollensak came out with a small portable and I put a lot of music on that. Lost forever, since the tape that was available then was oxide on paper, which deteriorated in just a few years. My college friend went a different way, having bought a Sears wire recorder, on which he recorded my first efforts as a jazz trombonist. All gone, probably fortunately.

To visit Mr. Crow’s web site, click here.

The news from Connecticut is that Dave Brubeck’s two-week hospitalization for a viral infection is at an end. The setback made him miss the premiere in California last week of a new orchestral work inspired by Ansel Adams. He and his son Chris had been working on it for a year. Brubeck is back home and back at work, but his doctors felt that a transcontinental trip was not a good idea for a recuperating 88-year-old. In advance of the premiere, Paul Conley spoke with the Brubecks, father and son, and did a report for National Public Radio. To hear it and see one of Adams’ most famous photos, follow this link and click on “Listen.”

Comments are still arriving about Bill Kirchner’s list of recommended big band recordings since 1955. You will find the original item here and followups here. Not all of the comments are coming to Rifftides. As discussions will in the internet age, this one gravitated to other sites.
Here is a little of what the unfailingly provocative young composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote on his Secrety Society web site.

The thing is, there’s an awful lot of bigband music that is important to the history of jazz that doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I’m afraid this would include a s— -ton of music that is beloved by true bigband connoisseurs. For instance, I know this sounds heretical, but most of Count Basie’s output after Jo Jones left the group leaves me totally cold. Also, I’ve never really been able to develop much affection for the various Stan Kenton bands, etc, even when I respect the craftsmanship and inventiveness of some of the writing.
The stuff I like best and respond to viscerally and have invested time in studying in detail really represents only a small corner of the vast bigband universe. The center of this solar system is definitely the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra — especially the first edition of the group with Richard Davis on bass. This has been my favorite bigband since I was thirteen years old.

If Darcy wants to make “big band” one word, he’ll just have to deal with the usage police. To read all of his entry, which includes recommendations of his own, go here. His readers chime in with provocative comments of their own.
On Do The Math, Ethan Iverson, pianist of The Bad Plus, rambles engagingly with the big band discussion as a sort of touch stone. Here’s part of his rambling.

I didn’t come from a family interested in music. We had a record player but hardly any records. However, my aunt and uncle had a small collection of 60’s-era stuff, and when we visited them I would head straight to their living room and start spinning platters. The two discs that just astounded me were This Time By Basie: Hits of the 50s and 60s and Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings by Art Simmons.
(Simmons isn’t well-known; I haven’t heard his record in about 25 years. In fact, I had forgotten entirely about Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings until today. Within a few minutes of reading Darcy’s post, I found and purchased a copy on eBay for a slight sum. Looking at this fabulous cover art really takes me back.)
After realizing that I always played them over and over, my relatives let me borrow the Basie and Simmons records so that I could tape them on my home reel-to-reel player.
Perhaps my younger readers don’t know what a reel-to-reel player is. The picture at the top of this post might look like serious studio equipment – and maybe it is, high-end ones are still used – but the one in my house looked just like that and was merely the clunky predecessor to the compact cassette tape. A reel-to-reel tape deck was the only common way to tape an LP before about 1970 or so.

I stole Ethan’s picture of the old Sony reel-to-reel machine. Iverson does get back to the matter of big bands. To read his entire entry, click here.
I still have the Revox reel-to-reel I inherited from Paul Desmond and use it frequently. I wish that some of my newer components were of Revox quality.

The text of a remarkable address is making its way around the internet through the part of the world in which music matters, which is everywhere. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the Boston Conservatory’s music division, greeted the parents of incoming freshman students. He made the speech in the fall of 2004, but it has taken on new life lately, because of passages like this:

I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds

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And this, which he told the parents he would be saying to their children:

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

Before he reached that point in his address, Paulnack talked about the ancient Greeks’ recognition of the similarity between music and astronomy, about Olivier Messiaen in a Nazi concentration camp writing and performing his Quartet For The End Time, about how the September 11 attack made Paulnack question the value of music, about how the performance of a piece by Aaron Copland affected a pilot who had seen a friend die in war half a century earlier.
Paulnack’s talk is about the unifying, healing nature of music. You can read the whole thing by clicking here.
I have never heard Karl Paulnack play the piano. His speech makes me want to.

Since Rifftides began nearly four years ago, I have posted frequently about Ben Webster – but not frequently enough. That would be impossible. Few improvising artists have achieved Webster’s level of supremacy at speaking their pieces with eloquence and brevity. I would not suggest that eloquence has fled; it is possible to be eloquent at length. But in the post-Coltrane age of solos as tests of endurance it may be unnecessary to point out that succinctness is not one of the guidelines in most jazz playbooks. Webster is an antidote to the ennui induced by long-windedness.
This year is the 100th anniversary of Webster’s birth. You may count on my finding every opportunity to call to your attention the art of that incomparable tenor saxophonist. This is a link to a recent piece that addresses a reader’s distress with a tenor saxophonist who pays tribute to Webster. It also leads you to video of a heartbreakingly beautiful Webster ballad performance and a series of comments from Rifftides readers. This link takes you to a piece from 2005 in which a woman who is neither a musician nor a critic encapsulates in a sentence the essence of Webster’s musical persona.
Here is Webster in two videos that materialized on YouTube just last November. He is with Oscar Peterson, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; and Tony Inzalaco, drums. The first piece is the blues he called “Poutin’.” The second is “Sunday,” one of his favorites for decades. This would seem to be early 1970s. Webster died in 1973.

Okay, we’ve had enough fun with Sue Raney’s Scopitone romp in the park. To see it and the comments about it, go here. But first, watch and listen to Ms. Raney sing a Henry Mancini song that has long been one of her signature pieces. This is the sort of thing I had in mind the other day when I used the adjective “divine” in referring to her.

I don’t know who the alto saxophone soloist is. He did a lovely job with the bridge.

Old pal Tim Ryan called my attention to an interview Judith Schlesinger, our leading combination jazz writer/psychotherapist, did with guitarist Gene Bertoncini nearly a year ago. The interview ran on the All About Jazz web site, and I missed it last April. Maybe you missed it, too. It is fascinating for its insights into Bertoncini’s musical thinking, his quick wit and his interchanges with Dr. Schlesinger. Verbatim transcribed interviews are far from my favorite form of journalism, but when they work, they can be valuable. This one works.
Here is an exchange that grew out of Judith’s mention of Bertoncini’s study of architecture at Notre Dame. He didn’t realize that he and Antonio Carlos Jobim had architecture in common. Throughout, Bertoncini is identified as GB, Dr. Schlesinger as AAJ.

AAJ: In discussing your music, people often speculate about how your architect training informs your playing. There’s another great musician who was also into architecture, and that was Jobim.
GB: Really?
AAJ: Apparently he was always good at drawing, so when he got married and needed to make some reliable money, he took the entrance exams for architecture school. But he only studied a year before going back to music.
GB: Wow, that’s wonderful! I didn’t know that. I owe you for this. We met backstage once. Did he ever talk about being influenced by architecture?
AAJ: Not that I know of, but Goethe once said that architecture was “frozen music.” What’s your take on the connection?
GB: In architecture, you’re analyzing a couple of things: artistic balance, balance in design and what constitutes good design, and the needs of people. When designing a structure of any kind you have to be concerned about what’s going to be happening inside the structure, and how it’s going to make life better for the people in it, whether in a residential or commercial situation. And that opens up all kinds of sensitivities in you. This awareness can easily translate into your music: it becomes a combination of satisfying yourself and being concerned with the needs of the listener.
I’m always thinking about how my music will affect people–I can’t wait to play this for somebody, because I think it’s going to make them feel good. Then there’s the idea of making a presentation, because an architect always has to present a completed concept for a client. The whole concept is there on paper. I believe very much that this has influenced my sense of arranging: I present a concept for each tune I play, pretty much, that I’ve thought about. There’s a beginning and ending and a middle; there’s balance, you know, in a harmonic sense, and in a linear sense, like looking at the elevation of a building.
That’s one of the reasons why I work out a lot of things on the guitar. It’s not just learning the notes, or how to improvise, it’s working out arrangements to improvise from. There are things I just play off the top of my head, but for the most part, I want to have a really great concept for each thing I play.

To read the entire long interview, go here. To hear samples of Bertoncini’s splendid duo guitar CD with Roni Ben-Hur, click here.