Archives for July 2010

Martin Drew died in London on Thursday of a heart attack. Drew was the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s club for 20 years beginning in 1975. He gained his greatest fame during the same period and into the new century playing around the world in Oscar Peterson’s trios and quartets. Recently he led his quintet The New Couriers, formed in tribute to the late saxophonist Tubby Hayes, with whom he played in the ’60s and early ’70s.
A master of his instrument who seemed uninterested in flaunting his considerable technique, Drew harnessed it in the service of swing and the dynamics of group interaction. Here he is with Peterson and bassist Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen in Berlin in 1985. Despite the erroneous titles on the YouTube screen as the playing begins, the piece is “Cakewalk.”

The French jazz critic Alain Gerber is also a novelist, or vice versa. He published a book in 2007 that may be a biography, a novel, or both. Its title in French is Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde, or Paul Desmond and the Feminine Side of the World. That is the extent of my ability to translate from French to English, and I owe it to Google. I’m the guy who gets by in France for two weeks at a time with Excusez-moi de vous deranger. Here is the Googleized English version of the French publisher’s description of the book:

He loved burning cigarettes at both ends. He loved scotch dewars with a youthful zeal, and then go home to around the early morning, waking in the middle of the afternoon and groping her horn-rimmed spectacles, and contemplate his hangover in the mirror of the bathroom, with a sense of accomplishment. He liked to kill time with extreme gentleness. Dying without impatience. discuss the eye. Talking about literature, poetry, ballet, film, comedy. But, above all, he loved women. […] They were his smoke without fire. telling and music prodigy, this dissipation of shimmer, this splendid infertility.

As Desmond’s English language biographer and drinking companion, I now have one more reason to regret his no longer being among us. I would give about anything—let’s say a bottle of Dewars—to read that passage to him, looking up and pausing after “groping her horn-rimmed spectacles.” Paul infrequently laughed out loud. He was more given to knowing chuckles, but that line might have done the trick. The French website offers this passage from the book:

“All it was – a saxophonist, star or unloved, Don Juan, a man without a wife, a writer without literature, alcoholic, desperate, lonely, good guest, a nostalgic, casual, maker of epigrams and witticisms, amateur puns, storyteller, and many other things – all he was, he never was really “

To see it in Alain Gerber’s native tongue, go here.
For the English translation of the web page, go here. I can find no evidence that Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde exists in anything but French.
Skill in languages is unnecessary for the enjoyment of Desmond, Jim Hall, Gene Wright and Connie Kay playing Matt Dennis’s timeless ballad “Angel Eyes.” This is from one of Paul’s RCA quartet albums of the 1960s. Seldom mentioned in assessments of Desmond’s and Hall’s playing is their ability to find blues implications in non-blues pieces.

The Rifftides staff is pleased to announce a new batch of the recommendations known as Doug’s Picks. Please proceed to the center column, scroll down and,

This rhetorical padding is used by countless politicians and, it seems, nearly everyone interviewed or quoted in the news, from President Obama on down:

Take it out of virtually any sentence and you will lose no meaning. Example:
“The administration will keep a close watch on this, moving forward.”
Getting rid of “moving forward;” now, that would be moving forward.
Of course, properly used, the phrase can be a source of inspiration…or amusement.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself—
Henry Ford

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We will move forward, we will move upward, and yes, we will move onward—
Dan Quayle

Jimmy Heath recently said he’s been hearing since he was a youngster that jazz is dying. The saxophonist and composer/arranger will be 84 in October. Joining him in discounting death rumors is a younger man, the veteran entrepreneur Todd Barkan, who runs the oddly named but vital Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, a bastion of jazz in New York City. Barkan is preparing a fall festival designed to help insure the music’s vitality by bringing together some of its wise elders with promising younger musicians. Pia Catton writes about the project in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“We are reaching a critical stage in jazz music because we’ve lost a lot of people in the last few years,” Mr. Barkan said. “Older artists teach a lot by example and the practice of jazz.”

To learn of Barkan’s plans for the festival and read all of the article, which includes an embedded video, go here.

Someone who identifies himself on YouTube as “liveacid” went to painstaking trouble to manufacture a video of Chet Baker and Paul Desmond playing “Autumn Leaves.” The music track is from Baker’s 1974 album She Was Too Good To Me. It was later reissued on the compilation Chet Baker & Paul Desmond Together. From disparate sources, the editor rounded up shots of Baker, Desmond, pianist Bob James, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Steve Gadd. You’ll hear Hubert Laws’ flute, but “liveacid” did not include shots of Laws.
The breaths Desmond and Baker take don’t match those in the music, although they often come uncannily close. Pay attention to what fingers and drumsticks are doing in relation to the notes and you’ll see the misses and near-misses. You never see the players together. The editor repeatedly recycles the same shots. Still, despite its flaws it’s a clever job of digital cut and paste. It is reason enough to listen again to players who, as the liner notes of that compilation remind us, were wonderful together.

Have a good weekend.

The Japanese have a longstanding love affair with jazz piano. Albums by jazz pianists sell consistently well in Japan. Leading pianists from around the world perform there in concerts and clubs. Indeed, the country has produced its own crops of world-class pianists, among them Toshiko Akiyoshi, Makoto Ozone, Kei Akagi, Junko Onishi and the current phenomenon Hiromi Uehara. A Japanese promoter organizes an annual tour called 100 Gold Fingers that features 10 prominent pianists in concert. The tour has included at one time or another Hank Jones, Roger Kellaway, Eddie Higgins, Jessica Williams, Junior Mance, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, Cedar Walton and Ray Bryant, among many others.
No one in Japan is more committed to jazz piano than Tetsuo Hara. He records horn players and singers, too, but his Venus Records catalog is packed with CDs by some of the music’s most prominent keyboard artists. Hara records many of them in New York under his supervision and that of the veteran producer Todd Barkan. His recordings have superior sound by first-rate engineers like Jim Anderson, David Darlington and Katherine Miller. For years, it was difficult and expensive for people outside Japan to acquire Venus records. Now, most of them are available in the US and elsewhere; at import prices, it’s true, but bargain offers show up on some web sites. Although original compositions occasionally materialize on Venus albums, Mr. Hara’s inclination is to have his artists record familiar music. In general, the results confirm that the song form offers endless possibilities, as even the famously iconoclastic saxophonist Archie Shepp demonstrates in his four Venus CDs.
Today’s topic, however, is pianists.
Roland Hanna, Après Un Reve (Venus). In this exquisite little recital, the pianist bases his improvisations on music by Schubert, Fauré, Borodin, Chopin, Mozart, Dvořák, Mahler and Anton Rubenstein. He recorded it less than two months before he died in November, 2002. Ron Carter’s bass lines and Grady Tate’s all-but-weightless drumming are perfect complements to Hanna, who reaches deep into the harmonic opportunites in pieces generations have loved for their melodies. Hanna’s clarity of conception and lightness of touch are beautifully captured in this flawlessly engineered recording. Among the pleasures here are his chord substitutions as he makes his stately way through Mozart’s indelible “Elvira Madigan” theme from the Op. 21 C Major Piano Concerto, the gravity of the trio’s treatment of the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 and—between those mostly solemn reflections—a Dvořák backbeat boogaloo on “Going Home” from The New World Symphony. This is a gem in Roland Hanna’s discography.
Eddie Higgins, If Dreams Come True (Venus). It is an indication of Higgins’s (1932-2009) popularity in Japan that the Venus catalog has 29 CDs under his name. Several of them, including this one from 2004, are trio or small band albums with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Joe Ascione. In accordance with the Hara dictum, all of the pieces but one are standards. That one, “Shinjuku Twilight,” is an attractive A-minor theme that stimulates Higgins and Leonhart to some of their best soloing in an album in which both are at the tops of their games. “Standards” doesn’t necessarily mean warhorses. “A Weekend in Havana” and “Into the Memory” are hardly overdone, and Higgins does them to a turn. It’s good to hear Higgins caress Xavier Cugat’s rarely performed ‘Nightingale,” convert “Days of Wine and Roses” into a “Killer Joe” soundalike and recall Django Reinhardt with a jaunty revival of “Minor Swing.” Alec Wilder’s “Moon and Sand” becomes a modified samba. The piece de resistance is “St. Louis Blues,” with a boogie woogie component that may not have been intended as tribute to Earl Hines but would surely have generated one of Hines’ thousand-watt smiles if he had heard it.
Stanley Cowell, Dancers In Love (Venus). Cowell recorded this in 1999 with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, young lions beginning to make their names. He had already established his own reputation among musicians but to this day remains unfamiliar even to many dedicated jazz listeners. In part, that is because Cowell has dedicated much of the latter part of his career to jazz education, most recently with tenure at Rutgers University. He is a complete pianist, capable not only of demonstrating the formidable technical aspects of Art Tatum but also of capturing the elusive subtleties and eccentricities of Thelonious Monk. In this album he employs his absolute command of the keyboard not in the service of display but of musical expression. Over the years, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” has become a vehicle for speedsters. Cowell takes it at the pace of a leisurely walk, disclosing the lyricism concealed in its intriguing harmonies. In a brief exposition of Duke Ellington’s “Dancers in Love,” he gets inside Ellington’s whimsy. He laces the cowboy song “Ole Texas” and a South African folk song with musical values and plays the whey out of Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag,” complete with bebop moments that make perfect sense. Cowell includes two originals, a bittersweet ballad called “I Never Dreamed” and “St. Croix,” which sparkles with calypso verve. His inventiveness in Gershwin’s “But Not For Me” is dazzling. This rarity of an album, like Cowell himself, should be better known.

Manfred Eicher has been successful with his ECM label not by constantly taking the pulse of the public and the record industry but by recording music he likes. That is an oversimplification, but not much of one. In the British newspaper The Guardian, Richard Williams has a piece about Eicher and his 40 years at the helm of the company he founded. Near the top of the article, he writes:

To its many admirers, ECM stands for a certain meditative, introspective approach to playing and listening. Its albums – about a thousand of them to date – are recorded and packaged with a deliberate refinement, once upsetting to those who concluded that Eicher had somehow squeezed the vitality from the jazz he professed to love, contaminating it by an association with his north European sensibility.
That argument seems to have been won.

Williams goes on to make the case, in part with quotes like this from Eicher:

“For me it’s very good to bring the demands of written music – phrasing, intonation, dynamics – to improvisational recording, where the approach is looser and more spontaneous. And vice versa, to bring some of the spirit of an improvised music session into a recording of written music, to get some empathy into it, so that it doesn’t become an academic-circle record. I’m trying to make an exchange, to bring one to the other.”

To read the whole thing, go here.

This was first a Rifftides post on March 24, 2006.

Thanks to Bill Reed and David Ehrenstein for calling this to our attention.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. —Igor Stravinsky

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. —Thelonious Monk

Richie Kamuca & Lee Konitz, Live at Donte’s 1974 (Cellar Door)
It’s a hoot to hear the saxophonists channel their hero Lester Young in this recently discovered session recorded at the lamented Los Angeles club. “Lester Leaps In” begins and ends as a unison duet, complete with stop-time breaks, reproducing Young’s 1939 solo on the master take of the piece with Count Basie’s Kansas City Seven. In their own solos, Kamuca and Konitz leave no doubt about where they came from. Kamuca, the tenor player, is clearest in his fealty to Young. Konitz, on alto, is more abstract in his Prezcience, but it has always been a major element in his work. The other tunes are standards in the gig books of musicians of Kamuca’s (1930-1977) and Konitz’s (1927- ) generation—”Just Friends,” “Star Eyes,” “All The Things You Are” and Bobby Troup’s “Baby, Baby All The Time.” Solos are long and exploratory; the shortest track is 7:41. The set has the exhilaration, rough edges, chance-taking and surprises that make for satisfying live performance.
Support for the two Ks is by the solid L.A. rhythm section of pianist Dolo Coker, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Jake Hanna, all of whom solo to great effect. Vinnegar goes beyond his customary walking bass for a couple of bowed solos and a bit of unexpected wildness in his “Lester Leaps In” solo, to the evident amusement of his colleagues and the audience. Coker, an under-recognized high achiever among Bud Powell admirers, has impressive moments throughout. Hanna cooks along, fueling the swing. Toward the end of the last track, “Lester,” he finally takes a solo. What he saved up is worth the wait. The sound of this session, exhumed from reel-to-reel tapes, won’t turn Rudy Van Gelder green with envy, but it’s perfectly acceptable; you can plainly hear what everyone is doing. Unearthing and releasing it is a feather in the cap of Cellar Door’s Bill Reed. On the CD box, it says, “Limited Edition.” The 300 copies probably won’t last long because there is nothing limited about the music.

Here is the new batch of short reviews —micro-reviews, perhaps—in which the Rifftides staff acknowledges some of the CDs that have attracted our attention lately. It would be impossible to hear all of every album that shows up. Even sampling a majority of them is a challenge. Evidence: these are some, only some, of the fairly recent arrivals. Whoever said jazz is dying hasn’t talked to my FedEx, UPS and USPS deliverymen.

Pharez Whitted, Transient Journey (Owl). In his liner notes, Neil Tesser writes of trumpeter Whitted’s playing, “the spirit of Freddie Hubbard hovers nearby.” It certainly does. With his facility and fat, even sound, Whitted does hard bop a la Hubbard to a turn. His own spirit seems to materialize most clearly in his slower pieces, notably the title tune and “Sunset on the Gaza”. On flugelhorn, he is reflective in “Until Tomorrow Comes,” with its samba inflection. Whitted’s sextet includes a rhythm section of fellow Chicagoans. In the front line he has the masterly guitarist Bobby Broom and saxophonist Eddie Bayard, who is from Jamaica by way of Ohio and fits nicely into Chicago’s tough tenor tradition.
Jacám Manricks, Trigonometry (Posi-Tone). A year after his stimulating Labyrinth (see the Rifftides review here), the young Australian based in New York divests himself of the chamber orchestra and pares down to a quartet, adding guest horns on three pieces. The writing skills he displayed on the previous album are in evidence in the smaller context. Using trompe l’oreille harmonies, Manricks voices his alto saxophone, Scott Wendholt’s trumpet and Alan Ferber’s trombone to sound like a larger ensemble. “Cluster Funk,” as audacious as its title, is a prime case in point. It has a beautifully shaped Wendholt solo. As for Manricks’ own playing, it ranges from heart-on-the-sleeve lyricism in “Mood Swing” to a sort of post-Konitz earnestness in “Slippery” to bounds and leaps reminiscent of Eric Dolphy in, among other pieces, Dolphy’s “Miss Ann.” Pianist Gary Versace, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Obed Calvaire are the well-matched rhythm section.
Dino Saluzzi, El Encuentro (ECM). The venerable bandoneónista combines with the strings of the Metropole Orchestra in a suite that alternates languor and drama. Saluzzi marinates four long tracks in the sadness and passion that characterize the Argentine tango tradition, accenting them with contrasting bursts of dance-like joy from his bandoneon. His saxophonist brother Feliz and cellist Anja Lechner—each with a rich, roomy tone—also solo in this beautifully recorded concert performance in the Netherlands. Any piece called “Miserere” obligates itself to carry the emotional weight the title implies. Saluzzi’s “Miserere,” with the profundity of his bandoneon solo section, meets the obligation. Like all lasting music, Saluzzi’s work discloses new facets with each hearing.
Trisha O’Brien, Out Of A Dream (Azica). Ms. O’Brien sings in tune, swings lightly with a good time feel, understands the meaning of lyrics, chooses fine songs and doesn’t scat. She and producer Elaine Martone know how to put a band together. Lewis Nash is the drummer, Peter Washington the bassist. On piano is the sensitive accompanist Shelly Berg, who also did the arrangements. Ken Peplowski plays tenor saxophone on three tracks and has a peach of a solo on “Taking a Chance on Love.” The songs are from what reviewers are required to call The Great American Songbook (anyone with a better name is welcome to submit it). That means we get Porter, Loesser, Berlin, and Burke and Van Heusen, among others. There are latterday entries by Joni Mitchell and Alan and Marilyn Bergman. In “Everybody Loves My Baby,” Ms. O’Brien manages to be both sinuous and saucy, with Peplowski commenting on tenor sax and Washington in a walking solo right out of the Leroy Vinnegar playbook.
More reviews to come. Soon, I hope.

In a doomed attempt to stay abreast of the torrent of new releases flooding into Rifftides world headquarters, the staff is feverishly preparing a series of brief reviews; perhaps “alerts” would be a better word. It is our intention to begin posting them tomorrow or the next day. Even in the digital age, however, listening is a linear proposition, so bear with us. We can’t just inhale the music, you know (no substance gags, please).
Oh, that was a substance gag.
Watch this space.

Ending this Rifftides mini-series of videos from the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1964 appearance on Belgian television is—what else?—the number that became a popular hit in a best-selling album and for Desmond, its composer, an annuity that by terms of his will is still funneling large amounts of money to the Red Cross. The quartet included it in all of their concerts around the world, lest there be disappointed audiences. This version has a brief solo from Desmond, an elegiac one from Brubeck, and Morello more subdued and thoughtful than he sometimes was in this show piece. There are cast and crew credits at the end of this beautifully produced television episode.