Archives for June 2005

Ending our survey of a few of the CDs that piled up while Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond was occupying the author, here are brief observations on three more.
Mulgrew Miller, Live At Yoshi’s, volumes one and two. One of the most consistently interesting pianists in jazz, Miller has in his trio Derrick Hodge, a new bassist to keep your ears on, and the rapidly developing drummer Karriem Riggins. Horace Silver’s “Peace,” Victor Feldman’s “Joshua” and Donald Brown’s “Waltz for Monk” are highlights.
Dexter Gordon, The Complete Prestige Recordings. This is everything the great tenor man recorded for Prestige from 1950 to 1973, eleven CDs’ worth, with a who’s-who of sidemen, peers and guests, from Wardell Gray to Freddie Hubbard. It’s Gordon in all of his complexity, subtlety and power. No retrospective this comprehensive can be A-plus throughout, but triumphs of the quality of “Fried Bananas,” “Stanley the Steamer,” “Body and Soul” and Dexter’s two-tenor collaborations with James Moody, uneven as they are in spots, carry the day.
Zoot Sims Recorded Live at e.j.’s Aug. 9, 1981 Atlanta, Georgia is the comprehensive title of a surprise released nearly twenty years after Sims’s death. With a fine local rhythm section, Zoot played the club in high spirits, sparring hilariously on three pieces with the Atlanta tenor man Rick Bell. As if to remind us that categorizing him as a descendant of Lester Young is too facile, he opens his “Take the ‘A’ Train” solo with a phrase that is pure Coleman Hawkins.

I have just been informed that WNYC radio in New York archived my June 23 appearance on The Leonard Lopate Show. It was a zippy thirteen-minute discussion of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. You can listen to it here. It’s the second item from the bottom of the page.
Joe Maita’s long interview with the author is transcribed on the Jerry Jazz Musician website. It is integrated with samples of Desmond’s playing and a few photographs from the book, in a skillfully assembled package. While you’re there, browse his site, which is loaded with riches and rewards. But hurry back.

My ArtsJournal colleague Terry Teachout points to a development in German publishing that he says should be of concern to all writers. I agree. It should also disturb readers dependent upon authors free of interference with their work. The situation involves a new biography of Carl Jung, the seminal (I hope that’s not too Freudian) psychoanalyst. Given the concern of jazz musicians and listeners with freedom of expression, I think that friends of Rifftides will find it important. To read the item, go to Watch On The Rhine in Terry’s Arts About Last Night web log.

Benny Carter died on July 12, 2003. His absence is made a little easier to bear with EMI’s reissue of a rare 1960 album originally on United Artists. The CD is Sax a la Carter, with Jimmy Rowles, Leroy Vinnegar and Mel Lewis. The programs begins with “And The Angels Sing” in shuffle rhythm, possibly to honor or tweak Jonah Jones, a trumpet sideman from Carter’s 1941 band who had a series of easy-listening shuffle hits in the late fifties. Lewis provides a shuffle beat that is essence of shuffling. Following eleven other standards, including a classic “If I Loved You,” Benny concludes with two of his own songs, neither well known. One is “Friendly Islands”, a bit of mild exotica that Martin Denny also recorded. On “Ennui,” heard for the first time on this CD, he plays the flowing melody on soprano saxophone, an instrument he should have employed more often. It lasts two minutes and nineteen seconds, with no improvisation, and it is glorious. None of the pieces runs longer than four minutes. That is as much time as Carter needed, as much as Rowles needed, to be memorable.
One of Benny’s biggest fans, Phil Woods, is teaming up these days with Bud Shank for appearances that might be billed as Two Tough Old Altos. I saw them, backed by Bill Mays, Joe LaBarbera and Chuck Deardorf, bring a festival audience of 1500 to its feet, cheering. The partnership is the jazz equivalent not of Grumpy Old Men, but The Sunshine Boys. It has produced the splendid CD Bouncing With Bud and Phil Live At Yoshi’s, recommended for two weeks now in the Doug’s Picks section in the right-hand column, and for good reason.
By 1959, Woods had established himself as one of New York’s hottest alto saxophone players—hot in terms of the emotional temperature he created in his solos and of demand for his services. That year, Quincy Jones landed Woods for his new big band, which went to Europe with Harold Arlen’s musical (often described as a blues opera) Free and Easy. The show soon folded, but Jones struggled to keep the band together and Phil stayed with it until it finally dissolved. The two bonded musically and personally. Jones went on to other endeavors, including movies scores and stewardship of Michael Jackson’s career, and eventually spun off almost entirely into pop music. I remember Phil saying a few years ago that he was happy about his pal’s success, but asking, plaintively, “couldn’t he make a jazz album at least every few years?”
That hasn’t happened, not with fealty to the straight-ahead jazz to which Woods remains committed. So, Phil made the album and called it This Is How I Feel About Quincy. Jones wrote all but one of the tunes, and his great ones are there, “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “Meet Benny Bailey,” “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set” and that delightful product of Jones’s early career, “Jessica’s Day.” The Woods Quintet with Brian Lynch, Bill Charlap, Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodwin is augmented with four horns to fill out the splendid arrangements by Woods (and one of “The Pawnbroker” by Lynch). Following a thoughtful and sinewy solo by Woods, his arrangement of “Stockholm Sweetnin’” encompasses a transcription of Clifford Brown’s famous trumpet solo alternated among combinations of the band’s eight melody instruments.
The playing by all hands is at the highest level. The Woods composition “Q’s Delight” is a tribute to his friend, but the entire album honors Quincy Jones by renewing and validating his music in its purest state, something that Jones himself has chosen not to do.

Yesterday I declared at an end the discussion of alternative approaches to improvisation, with a proviso: “Unless someone out there has a new take on this matter.” If you’re just joining us, the focus of the dialogue (or diablog) was the late tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins. The inquiry was into how much he knew about chords and whether he elected to play outside of them in spite of his knowledge, or because he lacked knowledge. Vibraharpist and teacher Charlie Shoemake responded to my original post about Perkins’s continuing growth and adventurousness, as did critic Larry Kart.
When accomplished composer-arrangers like Mike Longo and Bill Kirchner — theoreticians and talented soloists — weigh in, it would be rude and irresponsible not to allow them the virtual floor. Therefore, the discussion is reopened. (It’s wonderful to be your own editor and publisher). Let me suggest, even if you are not educated in theory and harmony, that you follow along here because the gist of what our guest experts offer can improve our listening ability, regardless of whether we know an F minor 7th chord from a Harmon mute. First, this communique from Mike Longo, leader and pianist of the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble.
MIKE LONGO

Just a note about the harmonic discussion centering around Bill Perkins, especially in connection with the comparison to Wayne Shorter in terms of the use of notes that are apparently not in the prevailing chord structure. Wayne, like many of today’s contemporary players, has embraced 20th century harmonic thinking which is rooted in intervalic playing. Once intervalic logic has been activated, notes that appear to be outside the spelling of the harmonic structure seem to sound related. This is because the logic of intervals has taken over.
For example, one may play an interval sequence that outlines an Fm7 chord and then play the same sequence a half step up and it will sound related to the original chord, even though on paper it may appear to be the tones of an F#m7 chord being played against an Fm7. In fact, it is merely a sequence of the intervals just heard, deflected up a half step. Therefore, the ear accepts it as related. These are practices employed by 20th century composers such as Bartok and Stravinsky and are outlined in a book by Vincent Persichetti called 20th Century Harmony which has become quite an influence on many contemporary jazz musicians.

In addition to his composing, arranging and playing, Bill Kirchner is a band leader, annotator (in depth) of Mosaic boxes, historian and editor of the invaluable Oxford Companion to Jazz.
BILL KIRCHNER
In jazz, improvising “outside the chords” goes back more than 50 years. For an early example of “sideslipping” (Jerry Coker’s term, I believe), hear Lennie Tristano’s 1955 recording of “Line Up” (based on “All of Me”). Tristano frequently uses phrases a half-step away from the basic chord scales. George Russell also pioneered in jazz bitonality in his writing as far back as 1949–hear his big-band charts on “A Bird in Igor’s Yard” (for Buddy DeFranco)* and “Similau” (for Artie Shaw).

In the early ’60s, John Coltrane extended this practice and probably did more than anyone to make what saxophonist Dave Liebman calls
“chromaticism” (in a jazz sense) part of the basic harmonic language
of this music. When playing on tunes like “Impressions,” Coltrane would superimpose phrases in several different tonalities on top of a basic tonality (e.g., D minor). Also, what’s called intervalic playing became popular; for an example of a tune written in that style (in this case, fourths), check out Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance”. Go to any jazz school in the world today, and you’ll hear this stuff coming out of the practice rooms.

Bill Perkins, being an intellectually curious man, checked all this
out in depth and to an extent incorporated it into his playing. However, Perkins came out of the Lester Young tradition; Young and
most of his disciples, as Charlie Shoemake pointed out, were “ear
players” in the best sense. Whatever they knew or didn’t know about
chords (Al Cohn, for one, knew a lot), harmony really wasn’t the
primary feature of their styles. Rather, it was melodic (linear)
playing, usually on simple changes. When I listen to Zoot Sims, I
don’t listen for a dazzling harmonic conception; he of course had
other virtues.(Though Stan Getz could play well on harmonically
challenging tunes like “Con Alma” when he wanted to.)

So, if Perkins once played an A natural against an F minor 7 chord, he could have made a mistake, or he could have been sideslipping to
produce an intentional momentary dissonance. Context and melodic
intent make an enormous difference. As pianist Jim McNeely once
remarked about his tenure with Getz, you don’t go to a player like
Getz and tell him that such-and-such a note doesn’t work against a
certain chord; a strong, well-placed melodic phrase usually will
override harmonic considerations. A great player can make “wrong”
notes work. As the Lunceford record said, “‘Tain’t Whatcha Do, It’s
the Way Thatcha Do It.”

By the way, for those seriously interested in these and similar
matters, I recommend Dave Liebman’s book A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody (Advance Music).

I won’t again make so bold as to say that’s the end of this conversation. Let’s see what happens.
*”A Bird in Igor’s Yard” is neary impossible to find on CD, but this link takes you to a box set that allegedly has it. Good luck, and let me know if you find it.

It’s time to put a wrap on the discussion about whether Bill Perkins knew the chord structures of pieces on which he improvised. You may recall that vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake, who played with Perkins, wasn’t convinced either way. Critic Larry Kart thought that Perk probably did know the chords but felt free to depart from harmonic guidelines that he thoroughy understood. Unless someone out there has a new take on this matter, Shoemake gets the last word.

Larry Kart could be right if he’s evaluating from Bill’s late recordings (which I don’t own). My observations came from standing next to him on the bandstand (here in Cambria and elsewhere). When I hear someone play an A natural half note on an F minor 7 chord, I figure that he either doesn’t know anything about chord changes or doesn’t care where they fall, a la Wayne Shorter.

We’re still catching up with CDs that appeared while I was writing Paul Desmond’s biography. If you don’t have your copy of the book yet, hurry.
ORBITAL DUKE
Columbia/Legacy is systematically reissuing (again) everything it has by Duke Ellington. In the case of Blues In Orbit, it has done so with class and thoroughness, from the inclusion of previously unissued pieces and alternate takes, to digital remastering that brings out nuances, to Patricia Willard’s informative new notes. The back-cover blurb calling Blues In Orbit an undervalued gem is accurate. In the late fifties, Ellington and Billy Strayhorn were writing intriguing things into new compositions and old ones alike, and the album radiates the feeling of discovery even on “C Jam Blues” and “In A Mellow Tone,” which the band had played hundreds of times. Johnny Hodges was back after a layoff and sounds happy to be home.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE
Emil Viklicky, a Czech born in Moravia in 1948, is one of the finest jazz pianists in the world. His standing in his own country may be inferred from that fact that last year when President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic initiated a series of jazz concerts at Prague Castle, the counterpart of the White House, Viklicky and his trio were the first performers. That concert, with the Swiss trumpeter Franco Ambrosetti as guest artist, was recorded and is available as Franco Ambrosetti & Emil Viklicky Trio (Multisonic 31 0644-2). Ambrosetti at first lessens the impact of his inventiveness by using excessive volume, but his ideas ultimately carry the day. Viklicky, bassist Frantisek Uhlir and drummer Laco Tropp are wonderful throughout, and sublime on the final three pieces, with Ambrosetti sitting out. Trying to negotiate the complex Multisonic website is frustrating. It would be easier to send the company an e-mail message to find out how to order. The CD is worth the trouble. (Can you imagine George W. Bush honoring jazz with a series of recitals at the White House?)
Here is a short list of other recent CDs that have given me pleasure or stimulation or at least kept my attention:
Ken Peplowski, Easy To Remember. Peplowski plays a varied program that includes a lovely unaccompanied clarinet solo on Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” and a tenor sax romp on Al Cohn’s “High on You.” There is fine work by Al’s guitarist son Joe and pianist Ted Rosenthal.
Branford Marsalis, Eternal. Quartet music by the saxophonist balancing originals with standards, among them the old Nat Cole ballad “The Ruby and the Pearl.” The title piece is well named; it runs eighteen minutes and holds up thanks to Marsalis’s continuity of ideas and cohesive accompaniment by pianist Joey Calderazzo and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. You want liner notes? The booklet tells you to download them from Marsalis’s web site. Puzzling consumer relations, putting the information burden on the customer.
Metz’n Around. Pianist Ed Metz, Sr. with drummer Ed, Jr., other family members and friends in oldies like “’Deed I Do,” “Little Rock Getaway” and “Goody Goody.” Infectious fun, and worth a few hearings for the solos of John Allred, a great trombonist.
Jane Monheit, Taking A Chance On Love. Imitative and overhyped at the beginning, she is now a grownup singer with her own personality and a touch too much vibrato in the middle register.
The Mildred Bailey Radio Shows.Three programs from 1945 with Bailey singing perfectly, of course, and exchanging scripted banter with guests Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey and Cozy Cole. The big band backing her has Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Red Norvo and Jimmy Maxwell, among others. What a singer.
Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow, Billy Drummond, The Lost Chords. This is really Bley’s record, and it’s laced with her angular humor as well as her profundity. Its opening suite is based on “Three Blind Mice.” One of the movements has a subsection titled “Leonard Feather.” Her notes are not about the music but about the group’s travails on a tour of Europe, complete with a map and amusing photographs. The music is excellent.
Enrico Pieranunzi, Paul Motian, Doorways. The Italian pianist and the former Bill Evans drummer in a series of pieces that are free and sound composed or are composed and sound free. When saxophonist Chris Potter joins them on three tracks, the result is nothing like Lester Young, Nat Cole and Buddy Rich. Abstract, luxuriant music.
Tomorrow: A few thoughts about Benny Carter and Phil Woods, among others.

Reissuing important music in impeccably produced editions, Mosaic Records continues to thrive. Its most recent box set is The Complete Clef/Verve Count Basie Fifties Studio Recordings. I just finished a long review of the album for Jazz Times. Watch for it in the September 35th anniversary issue.
Another recent Mosaic gem is The Complete Argo/Mercury Art Farmer, Benny Golson Jazztet Sessions. Farmer and Golson were in the thick of the hard bop movement of the 1950s and early sixties. Together, they transcended hard bop’s orthodoxies, Farmer with his incomparable melodic inventions on trumpet and flugelhorn, Golson as a writer of memorable tunes and pungent arrangements and as a lusty tenor saxophonist under the spell of Don Byas and Lucky Thompson. They reached what Gene Lees described in Down Beat in 1960 as “a balanced amalgam of formal written structure and free blowing — the long-sought Grail of jazz.” That balance is responsible for the music’s sounding fresh more than forty years later, along with remarkably undated playing by the leaders and their changing cast of sidemen.
The pianists were McCoy Tyner, Cedar Walton and Harold Mabern; the bassists Addison Farmer, Herbie Lewis and Tommy Williams; the trombonists Curtis Fuller, Tom McIntosh and Grachan Moncur III; the drummers Lex Humphries, Tootie Heath and Roy McCurdy. The seven CDs in the Mosaic box encompass everything the Jazztet recorded in its 1960-’62 incarnation (Farmer and Golson reassembled the band briefly in the 1980s), as well as individual dates by the leaders. They include four of the best quartet albums of the decade, Golson’s Free and Turning Point and Farmer’s Art and Perception. Both of Farmer’s and one of Golson’s quartet dates have Tommy Flanagan, the other Golson has Wynton Kelly, two of the most influential pianists in modern jazz. The box also contains Listen To Art Farmer And The Orchestra with Oliver Nelson’s arrangements, and Golson’s clever Take A Number From 1 To 10, in which he starts alone and adds one instrument per track until he has a tentet. In the twenty-page booklet, Bob Blumenthal contributes a deeply researched essay and track-by-track analysis.
With the Farmer/Golson bonanza coming on the heels of its monumental Complete Columbia Recordings Of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers 1945-1947, Mosaic is having a good run. As usual. The label’s Mosaic Select series of smaller boxes brings together in three CDs five Bob Brookmeyer albums from the fifties. It includes two rarities, Brookmeyer’s ten-inch 1954 Pacific Jazz quartet album with John Williams, Red Mitchell and Frank Isola, and The Street Swingers with guitarists Jim Hall and Jimmy Raney, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Osie Johnson. Mint copies of The Street Swingers LP have gone to Japanese collectors for hundreds of dollars. It’s good of Mosaic to rescue it from the archives for listeners of more modest means.
Brookmeyer long since passed safely through what he has called his “music to make your teeth hurt” period. For an idea of what he is up to these days, I recommend his Waltzing With Zoe for writing in a league that he and Bill Holman, among contemporary arranger-composers, occupy alone. Maria Schneider and Jim McNeely are stars of the farm club.
For Brookmeyer’s small group work on valve trombone, try Island, a challenging collaboration with Kenny Wheeler, possibly the most surprising trumpet soloist alive. John Snyder has revived his Artists House as a nonprofit organization and taken it into leading-edge multi-media production and education. Artists House includes in The Island package not only the CD but also a DVD with scenes of the recording session, interviews with the musicians and printable scores. To find Island on the Artists House website, click on “Contact” on the right side of the screen.
Snyder just completed his first academic season as Conrad Hilton Eminent Scholar and Director of Music Industry Studies at Loyola University in New Orleans. In case those Artists House and teaching involvements don’t keep him busy enough, he has also taken on stewardship of a series of musicians’ master classes at New York University. The Artists House web site presents streaming video of classes conducted by Benny Golson, Cecil Taylor, Percy and Jimmy Heath, Barry Harris and Clark Terry. The only one I’ve seen all the way through is Taylor’s. His question and answer session with NYU students is, like his music and his life, intriguing performance art.

When I stay with my friend Jack Brownlow(page 267 in The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond), he often comes up with special entertainment. Yesterday, it was a couple of episodes of The Beiderbecke Connection, a 1988 series from Granada, the British TV network. Jack’s daughter checked it out from the public library on VHS, but it is also available here on DVD. Trevor Chaplin and the adorable Barbara Flynn play the lead characters, unmarried school teachers with a child they call “the firstborn” because they can’t agree on a name for him. The couple have a talent for trouble when they try to accomodate beguiling, unscrupulous friends who request favors with a slightly illegal tinge.
Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker, among other jazz figures, come up casually in conversation among the characters. The scoring by Frank Ricotti, a musician previously unknown to me, functions well with the action of this mystery spoof. Ricotti is a vibraharpist and in one sequence leads his band in an episode that takes place in a London club called, oddly, The Village Vanguard. One of the few television series to incorporate running references to jazz and jazz artists, it features welcome subtlety and humor in script, acting and direction. Perhaps you’ve noticed that we don’t see much of that in domestic television these days.

You may knock New York if you like. I won’t. I lived there in the seventies, when it was truly knockable. Let me tell you three things about the couple of days I spent in Manhattan last week.
1. On the glorious day that was last Thursday, I sat blogging on my laptop in City Hall Park, a free wireless internet zone, a sure sign of a civilized city. I was surrounded by people eating their lunches in the sun, tours of grade school children gleefully and loudly exulting at the sight of baby squirrels, a man who looked to be about one hundred and five writing avidly in longhand, a city employee on the smallest riding lawnmower I’ve ever seen waving at the kids on each circuit of a patch of lawn as if he were Rex on a Mardi Gras parade float.
2. I saw planter after planter in midtown spilling over with spring flowers…wave petunias, coleus, begonias, comras and others I couldn’t name. Just down the hill from Carnegie Hall’s 56th Street side, the Metropolitan Tower has four magnificent raised beds of impatiens. In the elevator lobby, I congratulated the security guards on the flowers, and they beamed.
3. I sat down opposite Cole Porter’s piano at the Waldorf while Daryl Sherman was playing it and singing “I Like New York in June.” When she saw me, she altered the lyrics to, “I like Paul Desmond’s looks, er, licks, they give me a thrill.”
No, I won’t knock New York.

I first heard Rick Trolsen in New Orleans (Never The Big Easy, please, unless you want to be considered a tourist cornball unduly infuenced by bad movies; calling it The Crescent City is okay). He was in Al Belletto’s big band. I loved his unreservedly tromboney solos. Trolsen is not a young hot dog trombonist harboring an inner trumpeter yearning to be free, but a mature one who loves the instrument for itself. Since I have long been hooked on Brazilian music, it came as a double surprise and pleasure when Trolsen’s wryly titled Gringo Do Choro showed up one day while I was in the throes of a troublesome part of the Desmond book. I knew that if I put it on, I’d lose the writing battle, so I set it aside. When I finally got around to the CD, it made me even happier than I had anticipated. Trolsen recorded it in 2003 in Rio de Janeiro with eight Brazilian musicians of whom I have never heard, not surprising since it seems that one out of three Brazilians is an accomplished musician. His immersion in New Orleans is plain to hear in his samba improvisations, and he blends the north-south elements with verve, humor, saudade and the feeling of abandon common to both musics.
The repertoire includes pieces by Trolsen, Clare Fischer and assorted Brazilians including Anontio Carlos Jobim and Jacob do Bandolim. Bandolim loved the mandolin so much that he took the Portuguese word for it as his last name. Henry Lentino, who is on the album, kept his own name but plays the Bandolim beautifully. The package has Trolsen’s fine introductory notes, observations on the songs by Marcia M.A. de Brito and a great cover shot of the trombonist playing with Central Rio below and, in the distance, Sugar Loaf swathed in fog. You are unlikely to run across this in your corner one-stop. You can go to Trolsen’s web site to find out where to get it, or call (504) 368-8130. Many albums on artists’ own labels are premature, self-indulgent and boring. This one is generous of spirit and entertaining.
Luscious Lu (Okay, so it’s a corny subhead, but it’s not wrong)
Luciana Souza, a Brazilian turned New Yorker and new U.S. citizen, is one of the best singers in the world. She performs with equal facility and mastery in Brazilian music, American songs and classical music. She has sung Osvaldo Golijov’s “Pasion” with the New York Philharmonic and scatted with cutting-edge young jazz players in Greenwich Village. She wins critics polls (Last week, the Jazz Journalists Association’s Female Jazz Singer of the year award) and Grammy nominations. She is just beginning to reach the general acclaim justified by her talent and charisma. Souza’s musicianship is deep and wide. The half-step modulations she improvises over Romero Lubambo’s guitar in the tag ending of “Amanha” on her Brazilian Duos are astonishing. Her second volume of duets is, if anything, even better than the first. On North And South she stretches the phrasing of “All Of Me” with assurance, subtlety and control of the time so that although her approach is daring, she maintains respect for the song’s integrity. With the Maria Schneider Orchestra in Concert in the Garden her wordless vocalising is an integral element of the ensemble in Schneider’s title composition, the “Choro Dancado” section of “Three Romances” and the masterpiece of the album, “Buleria, Solea y Rumba.” In other words, Schneider uses Souza as an instrument in the orchestra. Souza executes the demanding parts flawlessly and, evidently, without effort.
Schneider Triumphant
With Concert in the Garden, Schneider reaches a plateau in her notable young career. The CD won four Jazz Journalists Association awards last week and a Grammy in the spring. The student of Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer is more clearly than ever an original voice in composition and orchestration. Her writing is integrated with the abilities of her musicians in ways that nurture the individualism of soloists like trumpeters Ingrid Jensen and Greg Gisbert, tenor saxophonists Rich Perry and Donny McCaslin and pianist Frank Kimbrough. Schneider is one of a few musicians also breaking ground on the business side of jazz recording. She made the album under the auspices of ArtistShare, formed to give artists control, more of the money they earn and a chance for their audiences to participate in and support the creative process. Guitarist Jim Hall has also joined AristShare and has released his first independent album, the brilliant Magic Meeting. Hall is preparing for ArtistShare a duo album with pianist Geoff Keezer. Bob Brookmeyer has joined ArtistShare, and Ingrid Jensen told me the other day that she is signing up as well. Assuming that it can matintain its integrity, the organization seems a bold step away from the convolutions, exploitation and abuses of the traditional recording industry. Schneider’s album is available only from her at ArtistShare. It is an indication of the way the world is going that the ArtistShare website offers neither a physical address nor a phone number. Sorry about that, troglodytes.

The latest on tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins’s solo methodology: critic and historian Larry Kart responds to musician Charlie Shoemake’s pondering the other day on the nature and origin of Perkins’s harmonic choices.

I understand what Charlie Shoemake says up a point, but then I don’t understand it all, at least not as it applies to latter-day Perkins, who seems to me to have become one of the more harmonically oriented players on the planet — a man whose melodies were in effect being generated by a series of (no doubt to some considerable degree self-invented) substitutions. Not only that, it also seems fairly clear to me that the obliqueness and, at times IMO, the awkwardness of Perkins’ latter-day harmonic thinking amounted to an attempt on his part to make obliqueness in that realm trickle over into the realm of rhythm,where Perkins apparently felt that he was far less fluid, hip, you name it than he would have wanted to be (witness his statements about how he felt about the rhythmic nature of his own playing versus that of Richie Kamuca when they were running buddies).
If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the model for latter-day Perkins was Thelonious Monk, in whose music every significant harmonic event (especially as rendered in pianistic terms) also was a significant rhythmic event (“the piano is a drum”). The problem here, at least for me, is that generating that kind of simultaneous harmonic/rhythmic friction and making it work in “language” terms over the long run is a heck of a lot harder to do on an essentially linear instrument like the tenor saxophone. One tenorman these days who seems to be doing, or trying to do, this is Rich Perry — whose playing to my ear bears some some resemblance to that of latter-day Perkins (at least in terms of underlying principles) and who, for what it’s worth (given Shoemake’s identification of Joe Henderson as a key harmonically oriented/knowledgable player), was so heavily influenced by Henderson when he was coming up that he was known as “Little Joe.”

Larry Kart’s new book is Jazz In Search Of Itself.

The trombonist and singer Eric Felten chimed in the other day on the proposition that listeners deserve the break of being given something familiar to hang their ears on before the improvisation starts.

I enjoyed your post on the question of writing new tunes, versus playing something recognizable. Jimmy Knepper once told me that the main reason he wrote new tunes for his albums was so that he would get the royalty taste rather than the Gershwins or Victor Young getting it. Thus his boppish “Spotlight Girl” instead of “Stella by Starlight.”
When one thinks of the great eras, and styles of jazz, each has a distinctive repertoire that immediately comes to mind, songs that every musician of the era would be able to play if they were called on the bandstand. Was there a swing era player who didn’t know “Lady Be Good” or “Moonglow” or “Undecided”? Bop players who didn’t know “Scrapple from the Apple?” Hard boppers who didn’t know “Moments Notice?” Or anyone since who doesn’t know the essential tunes from the Miles canon? But this came to a screeching halt sometime in the sixties or early seventies.
For all of the revival of jazz performance in the 80s and 90s — and for all the tunes written on all those records — I can’t think of a single song that has entered the jazz repertoire in the last 25 years. It isn’t that there haven’t been any good songs written, just that no one has picked one up and repeated it. One would think that, with the tremendous success of Norah Jones and the fact that several of the songs on her first record were jazz-inflected, we would see a slew of players treating “Don’t Know Why” as a new standard. But if that’s happened, I’ve missed it.
Why? I’m not really sure, but perhaps it’s because very few players today listen to the records being made by their contemporaries. I know I’m guilty of this myself — when I go to the record store, there’s always a Basie record or some such that I don’t have that I’d like to pick up. Maybe it’s that there just haven’t been enough distinctive, compelling tunes written. But I’d be interested in your thoughts on why the jazz repertoire seems to have stopped with the compiling of the Real Book (hmmm, and maybe that might have something to do with it…).

Hmmm, indeed. I’d be interested in Rifftides readers’ thoughts.
Back when I was first attempting to play jazz, someone gave me a three-ring binder full of surreptitiously photocopied lead sheets with lyrics and rudimentary chord symbols. “Learn these, and you’ll be okay,” my mentor said. The degree of okayness that ensued is still up for debate. But I digress. That book was a fake book. The difference between it and The Real Book is that The Real Book is legal.
It has been a long week, full of blogging and travel, with more travel to come. My intention is to post again on Monday, but if I slip, put something you like on your CD player, Ipod or Garrard AT6, and wait for me, please. If you don’t know what a Garrard AT6 is or was, ask your dad. Or his dad.
Have a good weekend.

Today, I’ll have the pleasure of being a guest on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, New York, 93.9 FM. I’m scheduled sometime around 12:30 or 1:00 pm. WNYC streams on the net here.
Later (much later) at 1:00 am Friday, I’ll talk about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond with Joey Reynolds on his WOR (710 AM) show. The Joey Reynolds Show streams on the net and also rides a satellite across much of the world, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico.

Here is a possibly prejudiced assertion: Jazz albums should have program notes. Listeners want and deserve information about the music. It seems that years ago someone in record company accounting decided that since rock albums sold in the millions without notes, why not treat jazz albums the same way and save a buck? Case in point: Don Byron’s Ivey-Divey titled after a saying of Lester Young’s and inspired by Young’s trio recordings with Nat Cole and Buddy Rich. CD buyers would have no way of knowing from the package about that inspiration unless they happened to catch and decode a reference to Young in the fine print thank-yous near the back of the booklet. Reviewers know because their advance copies of the CD came with a news release full of information about Byron’s addiction to Lester, unusual for an avant garde clarinetist, and his adaptation of Prez’s bassless trio format.
The release has quotes from Byron about why he chose Jack DeJohnette as the drummer and Jason Moran as the pianist (Moran reminded him of Jaki Byard), why he thought Lester’s music made sense as a point of departure for free playing, how he has two degrees of separation from Leopold Stokowski, and why the album includes two pieces from Miles Davis’s repertoire. As I often do in such situations, I cut and folded the news release into a size and shape that would fit inside the noteless Blue Note booklet. The consumer doesn’t have that option and remains in the dark about the genesis of a fascinating piece of work. Not all record company news releases would make good liner notes, but this one easily could have. Miles Davis and many other musicians have said that music speaks for itself and liner notes are unnecessary. Yes and no. I love Mahler more and understand him better because, through their album notes, writers like Jeremy Noble and Andreas Maul helped me hear things I might have missed. Serious listeners to serious music deserve insights other than their own.
So, how’s the Byron CD? Stimulating, fresh, iconoclastic, intriguing, a little upsetting. Byron is terrific on clarinet and bass clarinet. Lester Young comes through in softer clarinet passages and in Byron’s tenor playing, of which I wish there were more. DeJohnette is a wizard. This is the first Moran I’ve heard that gives me an inkling of why there is a good deal of shouting about him. I’m still waiting for the light to go on when I listen to his own Blue Note albums. I am particularly taken with Moran’s comping and soloing on Sammy Price’s “The Goon Drag,” which generates a slinky old New Orleans feeling.
McCoy Tyner’s Illuminations tackles that feeling in Tyner’s “New Orleans Stomp,” with trumpeter Terence Blanchard testifying like someone who grew up there, which he did. Lewis Nash, a drummer for whom my admiration is all but limitless, does a fair approximation of New Orleans parade drumming, but I decided to put it to the test by following it with Astral Project’s Burgundy from their 1998 Elevado and concluded that Johnny Vidacovich is still the modern champion of authentic parade drumming. He is, in fact, quite possibly the greatest little-known drummer alive, for the most part remaining near his home in New Orleans. Tyner’s (noteless) CD has, in addition to Blanchard and Nash, saxophonist Gary Bartz and bassist Christian McBride. His piano is leaner and more focused than I’ve heard it since his early 1960s Impulse! and Blue Note albums and his first work with The Jazztet and John Coltrane. The towering modal structures Tyner often erects are absent here. When he compensates with booting bebop on “The Chase” and Bill Evans-like voicings on “Come Rain or Come Shine,” I don’t mind the respite.
That’s enough for today.

Ken Dryden’s long review for All About Jazz of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond notes an aspect of the book with which I took some pains.

Ramsey avoids the use of psychobabble to explain Desmond’s relationship with his mentally disturbed mother, his reluctance to make long term commitments to any of the women in his life, or his experimentation with drugs. Instead one comes to accept them as part of his extremely complex character.

Read the entire review here.
Also in AAJ, Jack Bowers writes of The Bill Holman Band Live:

Big-band album of the year? It’s too early to say, but the first-ever live recording by the superlative Bill Holman Band has earned front-runner status for that honor and will surely be hard to trump. Holman, an acknowledged master in the realm of writing and arranging for large ensembles, already has one Grammy Award in the trophy case (for Brilliant Corners, his ingenious adaptation of the music of Thelonious Monk), and could soon have another if NARAS members lay aside any unreasonable biases and vote with their ears.

To read Bowers’ full review, go here.
Full disclosure: I wrote the liner essay for the album. It’s always fun to analyze one of Holman’s arrangements.

In “Woodrow,” leading up to Christian Jacob’s piano solo, Willis has the trumpets and the trombones play catch with a triplet figure. The reeds expand on the figure in ascent and Jacob echoes it as he begins his solo. Midway through Ray Herrmann’s tenor sax solo, triplet figures emerge again, this time tossed back and forth between the trumpets and the reeds, but only momentarily. The triplets make a final appearance in the ascending lines the sections play to end the piece. It is one of the threads that holds the arrangement together. Another, recalling the trombone section’s opening notes, is Bob Efford’s baritone sax combination of punchy off-beat quarter notes, and long tones. The baritone provides underscoring as the brass and reeds intermingle phrases that add up to the sort of thing Brookmeyer was talking about when he said that Holman’s arrangements speak. This is musical conversation of the highest order.

The rest of the notes come with the CD.

Yesterday afternoon, hydroplaning across the Cascade mountains toward Seattle in the first thunderstorm of the summer, I listened to an advance of Sonny Rollins’s next CD. The album is called Without A Song (The 9/11 Concert). It was recorded in Boston four days following the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in Lower Manhattan. Milestone will release it in August. Rollins is amazing on the title track and “Where or When.” Stephen Scott’s piano solos, dazzling and capricious, run Sonny a close second. Trombonist Clifton Anderson has a good night, and Bob Cranshaw demonstrates that a great player can give electric bass lines the definition, clarity, and swing of the acoustic instrument. The young drummer Perry Wilson and, on some tracks, percussionist Kimati Dinizulu kick things along, and the entire concert has a feeling of power and good humor.
I crested the summit of Snoqualmie Pass during a ferocious tenor solo on “Where or When,” then the CD ended to a thunderous ovation from the audience. At that moment the storm quadrupled its ferocity. The rain beat on the windshield with an intense roar. Lightning ripped across the horizon. It was as if the forces of nature were acknowledging one of their own.

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. Marc Seales, bassist Doug Miller and Origin’s 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 recording. Seales’s playing is less spikey, less loose, than Hope’s, and has a transparency that opens clear views into Hope’s unconventional harmonic constructions. Hope’s 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’s “This Sweet Sorrow.” Anyone intrigued by this CD may want to check out Hope’s own work. Fantasy’s Original Jazz Classics catalog has six of his albums. Elmo Hope Trio with Jimmy Bond and Frank Butler is a good place to start.
Add the Seattle Women’s 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’s Osgood Fielding III character in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect. On the evidence of Dreamcatcher, the band’s weakest point is soloing, but the section work is good and the ensemble generates a rolling swing on several pieces including Johnny Griffin’s “63rd Street Theme” and Kim Richmond’s “Big Mama Louise.”
ALL ROOTY
The astonishingly talented trumpeter and saxophonist Jay Thomas 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’t get the “McVouty” connection, you are required to immediately rush out and buy every Gaillard record you can find, starting with this box set. Thomas’s Accidentally Yours 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’s expressiveness and tonal dynamics on his ballad “Time Out of Time” 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.
Laura 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 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’m Confessin’.” With the trio, she swings, of all things, “Be My Love.” The CD has no composer credits, an oversight unusual for Bishop’s labels, but an increasingly common — and aggravating — failing of many albums. Origin captions its photographs so that you know which musician is which. I’ve 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.
MIKE LONGO AND HIS BOSS
Photo anonymity is the only sin committed by Oasis pianist Mike Longo’s 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 — Longo, Sam Burtis, Santi Debriano, Gerry Niewood, Curtis Fowlkes — 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’s 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’s flugelhorn solo on reed section passages that billow and swell. His way with the blues on two originals, “Bag of Bones” and “Mike’s Lament,” is delicious. He makes of Jobim’s “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’s 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.
The memory of Longo’s former boss is not entirely well served by a CD on the Just A Memory label, Dizzy Gillespie: Salt Peanuts. Benny Carter, who admired Dizzy, put it perfectly when he said — privately — that the aging Gillespie was a prisoner of his own technique. Now that they’re both gone, I don’t 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’s 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.
The 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’s 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’s 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’s love affair with the instrument has always been a puzzle.
This CD could serve as spirited party music, and it’s 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’s release, but his estate okayed it. I doubt if I’ll 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’s liner notes supply helpful background.
That’s enough for today.

The June 17 item about Bill Perkins elicited this response from Gordon Sapsed in the UK.

Thank you – and to Steve Voce for the original interview. The piece today about Bill Perkins has got me starting my day revisiting Perk Plays Prez – and the CD will follow into the car with me when I go out later. I had forgotten that it is Jan Lundgren on piano – and that Jack Sheldon vocal! Rifftides is already influencing my life ….

Tell your friends. We want all the visitors we can round up.
The superb vibraharpist, jazz theoretician and teacher Charlie Shoemake e-mailed this reflection on Perkins.

Bill Perkins was a wonderful musician but a bit of a mystery to me.I’ve always thought that there were two ways to improvise.One, completely by ear and, two, by ear based on knowledge of chord changes.If you were to transcribe any solos of Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Dexter Gordon, Harold Land, Sonny Rollins, Tubby Hayes, Joe Henderson, (and many others coming from Charlie Parker’s concept) you would be able to easily ascertain the chord changes of the song from their melodic lines because that’s where they’re drawing them from. With other players like Zoot Sims, Art Pepper, Paul
Desmond, and Bill you couldn’t. In an earlier time think of the difference between Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw or Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins.
It’s not that one way is infinitely better (though I myself always tended toward more admiration for the harmonically knowledgeable guys), they’re just two different approaches. The mystery for me with Bill’s playing was that I always assumed that because of his style that he didn’t know anything about chord changes, but in speaking with the fine pianist Frank Stazzeri awhile back (Frank worked and recorded with Bill extensively) he said that wasn’t the case at all. He said that he too felt as I did at first but as he got to know and work with him more he realized that in actuality Bill knew EVERTHING about the changes of the songs he played.He just heard his melodic lines in a different way. This was really surprising to me because, as you mentioned in your piece, he started out coming from a Lester Young base and finished more in the style of Wayne Shorter (both of whom put very little stock on improvising off of specific chords). Straz also said that Bill’s playing (and personality as well) always had some hidden hint of mystery, which I certainly agree with.

Charlie and his wife, the fine singer Sandi Shoemake, left the wrangle that L.A. has become and moved up the coast to Cambria. They run a series of concerts at a restaurant called the Hamlet, with name players as guests. It has become a Central Coast attraction, I once wrote, second only to the Hearst Castle. Details here.