{"id":32,"date":"2005-06-22T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-22T08:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp\/?p=32"},"modified":"2005-06-22T01:05:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-22T08:05:00","slug":"origin_continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/2005\/06\/origin_continued\/","title":{"rendered":"Origin (Continued)"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re examining some of the CDs that I couldn’t get around to during the gestation of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond<\/em><\/a>. Today, more from the Origin label and one each from Jay Thomas, Mike Longo and Dizzy Gillespie.
\nNew Stories: Hope Is In The Air: The Music of Elmo Hope<\/em><\/a>. Marc Seales, bassist Doug Miller and Origin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drummer proprietor, John Bishop, are the New Stories trio. The less famous peer of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, Hope was a splendid pianist who left an impressive body of compositions. Three of them, “Dee-Dah,” “Bellarosa” and “Carving the Rock,” are familiar to many through an early Clifford Brown<\/a> recording. Seales\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s playing is less spikey, less loose, than Hope\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, and has a transparency that opens clear views into Hope\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unconventional harmonic constructions. Hope\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s widow and collaborator, Bertha, plays piano on three tracks, with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington. There are guest appearances by the underappreciated alto saxophonist Bobby Porcelli and trumpeter Don Sickler. Roberta Gambini sings, beautifully, Hope\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “This Sweet Sorrow.” Anyone intrigued by this CD may want to check out Hope\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own work. Fantasy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Original Jazz Classics catalog has six of his albums. Elmo Hope Trio<\/em><\/a> with Jimmy Bond and Frank Butler is a good place to start.
\nAdd the Seattle Women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Jazz Orchestra to the growing list of successful all-female groups. Well, almost all-female. The lead trumpeters and the drummer are men, but, to quote Joe E. Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Osgood Fielding III character in Some Like It Hot<\/em>, nobody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perfect. On the evidence of Dreamcatcher<\/em><\/a>, the band\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weakest point is soloing, but the section work is good and the ensemble generates a rolling swing on several pieces including Johnny Griffin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “63rd Street Theme” and Kim Richmond\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “Big Mama Louise.”
\nALL ROOTY<\/strong>
\nThe astonishingly talented trumpeter and saxophonist Jay Thomas<\/a> is one Seattle jazz musician who does not record for Origin. That is because he has his own label, McVouty, named in honor of his former employer Slim Gaillard. If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153McVouty\u00e2\u20ac\u009d connection, you are required to immediately rush out and buy every Gaillard record you can find, starting with this<\/a> box set. Thomas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Accidentally Yours<\/a><\/em> features two other extraordinary musicians, the former Ray Brown pianist Geoffrey Keezer and Wataru Hamasaki, a newly minted Japanese medical doctor who operates a tenor saxophone. In his photographs, Hamasaki looks like a freshly scrubbed teenager. With the perfect support of Keezer, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer John Wikan, Hamasaki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expressiveness and tonal dynamics on his ballad \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Time Out of Time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d exemplify the qualities that make him a young tenor to keep your ears on. Questions of the relative fame of other trumpeters aside, Thomas is one of the finest improvising musicians alive, as he demonstrates here on trumpet, flugelhorn and soprano saxophone.
\nLaura Welland is a bassist and trumpeter developing into a singer with a clear soprano voice and considerable potential. She debuts on Love Is Never Out Of Season<\/em><\/a> a collection of a dozen standards. Her rhythm section is Bill Mays, John Clayton and Joe LaBarbera, not a bad way to launch a career. Welland and Mays are a relaxed duo on “I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m Confessin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.” With the trio, she swings, of all things, “Be My Love.” The CD has no composer credits, an oversight unusual for Bishop\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s labels, but an increasingly common \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and aggravating \u00e2\u20ac\u201d failing of many albums. Origin captions its photographs so that you know which musician is which. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen dozens of CD packages lately with mystery photos of the participants. Without identification, a picture of a big band is largely meaningless except, possibly, to friends and family of the players.
\nMIKE LONGO AND HIS BOSS <\/strong>
\nPhoto anonymity is the only sin committed by Oasis<\/em><\/a> pianist Mike Longo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s latest CD with his New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble. The seventeen-piece band is rehearsed tightly and swings loosely. It has a few veterans \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Longo, Sam Burtis, Santi Debriano, Gerry Niewood, Curtis Fowlkes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but Longo knows where to also find state-of-the-art musicians without household names. Tenor saxophonist Frank Perowsky, trumpeters Joe Magnarelli and Freddie Hendrix, guitarist Adam Rafferty and singer Hilary Gardner are among the notable young soloists, but to these ears Longo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing is the main attraction. He is immersed in the tradition of big-band arranging from Eddie Sauter, Ralph Burns, Dizzy Gillespie and Gil Fuller forward, invests ballads with unsentimental softness and has a knack for the harmonic tang of impressionism in his voicings across the sections. He digs beneath “Lazy Afternoon” to rework the changes in ways that illuminate the melody and float Magnarelli\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s flugelhorn solo on reed section passages that billow and swell. His way with the blues on two originals, “Bag of Bones” and “Mike\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lament,” is delicious. He makes of Jobim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “No More Blues” (“Chega de Saudade”) a fine romp punctuated by lusty, deep trombone interjections. Longo is not averse to giving another writer a showcase. Perowsky\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s composition “Song of My Dream,” in his arrangment, with a nicely crafted lyric by Philip Namenworth and a stunning performance by Ms. Gardner, is an homage to Duke Ellington. It ends the album and keeps surfacing in my mind.
\nThe memory of Longo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s former boss is not entirely well served by a CD on the Just A Memory label, Dizzy Gillespie: Salt Peanuts<\/em><\/a>. Benny Carter, who admired Dizzy, put it perfectly when he said \u00e2\u20ac\u201d privately \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that the aging Gillespie was a prisoner of his own technique. Now that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re both gone, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind quoting Benny. What I take him to have meant was that, unlike Louis Armstrong or Chet Baker, to use two disparate examples, Gillespie could not adjust his playing to the loss of the speed and range that still governed his conception. Dizzy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s humor, magnetic personality, singing and incomparable rhythm were strong to the end. Late in his career he could produce flashes of brilliance, but his trumpet chops were uneven, at best.
\nThe night this was taped at the Rising Sun Celebrity Club in Montreal in 1981, he did a lot of fluffing and foundering, although in “Night in Tunisia” he nailed a couple of complex runs that could have come from 1949. Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabyyr\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s flute is clearly heard, but his tenor saxophone is often so far from the microphone that he might have phoned in some of his solos. Al-Khabyyr, whose birth name was Russell Thomas, was a solid, blues-inflected player who tended to contaminate his lovely melodic inventions with gratuitous honks and squeals. Guitarist Ed Cherry, when you can hear him, and drummer Tommy Campbell are in great form. Michael Howell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s electric bass is overmodulated into mush much of the time, an abuse chronic to that annoying instrument. If all electric bassists would take from Steve Swallow and Bob Cranshaw lessons in tone and restraint, this would be a better world. Dizzy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love affair with the instrument has always been a puzzle.
\nThis CD could serve as spirited party music, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not hard to believe that the audience had a great time. Dizzy’s singing on “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” is a joy. It is difficult to imagine that Gillespie would have approved the recording\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s release, but his estate okayed it. I doubt if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll listen to it often, but just a memory of his charm and charisma kept me with it and underlined how much I miss him. Len Dobbin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s liner notes supply helpful background.
\nThat’s enough for today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re examining some of the CDs that I couldn’t get around to during the gestation of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. Today, more from the Origin label and one each from Jay Thomas, Mike Longo and Dizzy Gillespie. New Stories: Hope Is In The Air: The Music of Elmo Hope. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}