Archives for March 2011

Rifftides readers who responded enthusiastically to the video we posted on February 22 in connection with a piece about the Modern Jazz Quartet may be absolutely delirious when they see—and hear—this one. Again, the music is John Lewis’s “The Golden Striker.” The video is from the same 1982 MJQ tour that produced the version recorded in Holland. This time, they were at the Alexandra Palace in London. Now, there is more than the mere suggestion of a smile from Milt Jackson. Everybody is smiling. This is a remarkable performance by all hands, but Percy Health’s solo won the audience.

“The Golden Striker” is from John Lewis’s score for the film No Sun in Venice. His inspiration was these figures on the clock tower In the Piazza San Marco.

We have been notified that Rifftides is on the Accredited Online Colleges’ list of 30 best blogs for jazz students. This is the entry:

Rifftides bursts at the seams with award-winning jazz critic and journalist Doug Ramsey’s observations on the scene past and present. He updates almost constantly with all the latest news and opinions from around the jazz world.

We’re 30th on the list, but the staff felt better when we found a disclaimer in the preamble:

This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it one ranking entrants in any particular order.

That’s a relief. To see the list, which is equipped with links, go here. Blogs are proliferating. You may find a few that you hadn’t known about. After you check them out, please hurry back.

Welcome, students. We’re all lifelong students, aren’t we?

Bill Dixon, Intents and Purposes (International Phonograph). Dixon, who died last year at 84, is typically described as a force in the free jazz that emerged in the1960s. He was that, but Intents and Purposes defied labeling when Dixon recorded it more than four decades ago. This long overdue reissue confirms that the album withstands categorization. Its daring and forthright iconoclasm has substance that outlives much music that was conceived in protest or defiance in the roiling atmosphere of that era.

Dixon’s trumpet and flugelhorn improvisations flow, jab, dance, flutter, growl and brood through, around and over the other musicians. In some cases, the other musicians are Dixon himself, overdubbed. The first of the two brief “Nightfall Pieces” has multiples of Dixon and flutist George Marge creating a mesmerizing soundscape. In the second, Dixon ruminates in call-and-response with himself across the stereo channels. Favoring low notes on his own instruments and those of others, he employs the ten-piece group in “Metamorphosis” to create rich substrata voicings. Bass trombone, bass clarinet, cello and two double basses are among the instruments that provide oddly reassuring contrast with Dixon, alto saxophonist Robin Kenyatta and bass clarinetist Bayard Lancaster, whose solos search almost to the edge of desperation. “Metamorphosis” includes written passages of subtle complexity that it would be easy to overlook in the passion of the performance.

In “Voices,” whether he achieves it on paper or by contrivance in the studio, Dixon manages to give his trumpet, Lancaster’s bass clarinet, Jimmy Garrison’s bass, Catherine Norris’s cello and Robert Frank Pozar’s drums fullness of sound one might expect from an ensemble half again bigger. Dixon’s choice of musicians was eclectic; avant gardists like Kenyatta, Lancaster and Garrison alongside the mainstream trombonist Jimmy Cheatham and Marge, a reliable reed specialist of the New York studio scene.

To his credit, reissue producer Jonathan Horwich saw to it that the Dixon album looks like the original RCA Victor LP, down to the striking cover shot. It is a reminder that record packages were once a pleasure to handle and the notes easy to read. The liner notes are included as an insert that unfolds to nearly the size of an LP sleeve. More important, the quality of the sound recorded in RCA’s storied studio B is flawlessly remastered. In a brief addendum to the notes, Horwich writes of Intents and Purposes,

It stands as one of the most important and revolutionary musical expressions of the 20th century.

That may be true.

There was nothing like it before 1966/67 and there has been nothing like it since.

That is true.

Bill Mays writes from Japan, where—despite earthquake, tsunami and radiation—the Phil Woods Quintet is on tour: Mays, piano; Woods, alto saxophone; Brian Lynch, trumpet; Steve Gilmore, bass; Bill Goodwin, drums.

Food and bottled water have not been a problem here in Tokyo. Transportation has posed no problem. Radiation levels are “safe.” We are avoiding milk, tap water, other questionable items. I was a little paranoid the first two days here and ate nothing but bananas and trail mix. Have felt 5 or 6 mild aftershocks. Aside from streets being not as crowded and neon signs off, life in Tokyo appears normal.

Phil’s group is holding up well, and concerts are near sold out, and that at 8000+ yen a seat (more than $100 U.S.) They are starved for the music, what with all the groups that have canceled.

Boy did we have a soulful audience in Yokohama tonight. They just about ate us up. There were young (all of them girls) alto sax players lined up to have Phil sign their alto cases–so cute).

As an addendum to his note from Tokyo in the preceding item, Bill Mays sent a link to a video and wrote:

After Bird’s version of this tune, this one’s my second favorite.

I can see why. The Rifftides staff rounded up both versions of “Just Friends.” Here they are, in Mays’ order of preference.

Frank Foster wrote “Shiny Stockings” when he was in Count Basie’s “New Testament” band of the mid-1950s. He gained fame as half of Basie’s “Two Franks” tenor saxophone tandem with Frank Wess. The piece became a staple of not only the Basie band but of big jazz bands around the world. There is hardly a high school or college stage band that doesn’t have “Shiny Stockings” in its book. An experienced musician before he joined Basie, Foster went on to earn widespread admiration as a player, composer, arranger, educator and—for a time—leader of the Basie band following Basie’s death in 1984. He also led his own big bands, the Loud Minority and the Living Color Band.

At 82, Foster is recovering from a stroke and fighting diabetes. To help with medical expenses, there will be a benefit for him this weekend not far from his home in Chesapeake, Virginia. Bill Lohman writes about it in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

One would think Foster would be a rich man, based on just that one song, but that is not the case. Foster had never received his full due for “Shiny Stockings,” which he wrote in 1955, or other songs he had written or arranged because of contracts that took advantage of his primary interest being in music, not business.

To read all of Lohman’s column, go here.

It is unlikely that anyone who ever heard the Basie recording of “Shiny Stockings” has forgotten how it goes, but just in case, here it is with Foster soloing on tenor and a picture of Basie.

Among dozens of videos featuring “Shiny Stockings,” the Rifftides staff could find no trace of film or tape of the piece when Foster was on the Basie Band. If you know of one, let us know.

It is the first day of spring and, naturally, Igor Stravinsky is on everyone’s mind. Well, perhaps not everyone’s, but he is powerfully on the minds of The Bad Plus. That trio of restless and sometimes disturbing seekers are adapting Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a piece that nearly a century ago sent even more shock waves through the music world than The Bad Plus sends today. National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday launched into spring with a feature on a marriage that seems less unlikely the more you hear about it. To listen to Liane Hansen’s discussion with Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King, and samples of their work-in-progress, go here.

It wasn’t only Stravinsky’s music caused the chaotic stir at the 1913 premier of The Rite of Spring. It was ballet music, and no one in the scandalized Paris audience had seen anything like this ballet. Here is some of the Joffrey Ballet’s 1987 recreation of Nijinksy’s choreography. The video cuts off prematurely, but there’s enough to give you a vivid idea of what the shouting was about.

Here are two great spring songs, performed at European festivals.

First, Ellis Marsalis at Spain’s Jazz Vitoria Gasteiz in 1992 with Tommy Wolf’s and Fran Landesman’s “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.>”

Randy Brecker played at Plovdid Jazz Nights 2009 in Bulgaria’s second largest city. With him were Ventzislav Blagoev, flugelhorn; Shibil Benev; guitar; Plamen Karadonev, piano; Trifon Dimitrov, bass; and Dimitar Dimitrov, drums, playing Freddie Hubbard’s “Up Jumped Spring.”

Have a happy Spring.

Jeffrey Snedeker, Minor Returns (JS). Snedeker is a rarity, a first-chair symphony French horn artist who understands jazz time, phrasing and feeling. In settings from quartet through big band to 41-piece string orchestra, he pays homage to the horn’s role in jazz. Snedeker solos on pieces associated with the music’s handful of French horn heroes, including Julius Watkins, David Amram, Willie Ruff and John Graas. Among his colleagues is the perennial French horn poll winner Tom Varner, one of the few players of the instrument to make a substantial impact in jazz over the past two decades.

Snedeker and Varner revisit “Two French Fries,” the Gigi Gryce piece that featured Watkins and Amram in a 1956 Oscar Pettiford big band album. Doubling the duration of the Pettiford performance, they solo at length, exchange fours with drummer Tom Noble, do simultaneous improvisation and—stunningly—play in unison, harmonized with two saxophones, a transcription of Watkins’ virtuoso solo from the Pettiford record. Their backing on “Two French Fries” is by the Central Washington University Jazz Band 1, which nails the demanding arrangement. Varner is also a guest on “Linda Delia,” a Latin number Watkins recorded with Les Jazz Modes, the group he led in the 1950s with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse. Watkins might grin knowingly at Varner’s note-bending solo.

John Graas’ “Allegretto, from Jazz Symphony No. 1” is an octet arrangement reminiscent of Graas’ 1950s west coast milieu. The blowing choruses are built on the changes of “All The Things You Are” and have fine solos from Snedeker, alto saxophonist Lenny Price, trombonist Phil Dean, and tenor saxophonist Saul Cline—indications of the often-overlooked quality of jazz talent in the Pacific Northwest. “Godchild” has the same Gerry Mulligan arrangement and instrumentation as the 1949 Miles Davis Birth Of The Cool recording. Snedeker pays tribute by quoting the first notes of Davis’ solo before he constructs his own. Price, on alto, and tubaist Curtis Peacock also solo to good effect.

Snedeker was inspired by the example of Willie Ruff to include “Summertime,” “Oleo,” “Chelsea Bridge” and “Autumn Leaves,” all recorded by the Mitchell/Ruff Duo. His inspiration for the amusing version of “Straight No Chaser” is the similarity of its melody line to the famous horn passage in Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, dramatically intoned by Snedeker before he counts off a brisk pace for Monk’s famous blues in F. It has effective solos by pianist John Sanders, drummer Garey Williams and Snedeker. The other direct classical association is “Moonlove,” Andre Kostelanetz’s appropriation of the horn theme from the andante cantabile movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Sanders introduces it with a succession of Tchaikovskian chords, then Snedeker plays the famous melody before he and the rhythm section make their lilting way through a chorus of ¾ swing.

Snedeker plays “Take Five” unaccompanied, incorporating split tones and startling interval drops to the nether region of the horn. “In a Sentimental Mood,” the sole track with strings, is rich with horn melody and variations over an ingenious arrangement by the late Tom Gause. The title piece and “Home Away From Home” are originals by Snedeker’s composer brother Gregory, both with challenging harmonies and time changes, and with powerful bass work by Isaac Castillo, another Northwesterner worth keeping an ear on.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young. (On the Pulitzer board denying him the prize the Pulitzer jury voted him in 1965.)

Bruno Leicht writes from Germany:

Here’s one of my favorite tunes. It’s a forgotten one. I know it since I was 17, and I still love it. What tricky writing for the clarinets, huh?

Yes, and what singing by Herb Jeffries. The other soloist is Harry Carney, baritone saxophone. This was July 9, 1941.

Duke Ellington And His Famous Orchestra at their peak. “Brown Skin Gal” is from this collection. Thanks for the reminder, Bruno.

Because it has been too long since you’ve heard him, and because these two videos are—by all accounts—the only ones in existence that show him playing. His rhythm section at the Golden Circle in Stockholm in 1963 was Goran Lindberg, piano; Goran Peterson, bass; and Leif Wennerstron, drums. Please disregard the lead-in advertisement and the dreadful picture quality. Let us simply be grateful that these films exist.

Dorham’s solo in this brief second clip is some of his most astonishingly beautiful playing.

Kenny Dorham died in 1972 at the age of 48. The album Blues In Bebop has his early work with Billy Eckstine, Bud Powell, Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, in that order. Our Thing, a basic repertoire item, documents his 1963 partnership with tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson.

Joe Morello, the drummer best known for his long tenure with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, died this morning at his home in New Jersey. Morello joined Brubeck in 1956, remained with the group until it disbanded in 1967 and later played with it in reunions. He joined Brubeck after three years in Marian McPartland’s trio.  Earlier in the 1950s he worked with Gil Melle, Johnny Smith and, briefly, with Stan Kenton. His eyesight, always troublesome, began to fail in the later Brubeck years and by 1976 was gone. He continued to teach. It was not unusual for students from far-flung parts of the world to come to him for lessons.

When Brubeck offered him the drum chair after Joe Dodge left the quartet, Morello accepted on the condition that he be featured as a soloist. His solos became an attraction that, combined with Brubeck’s and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond’s established fame, helped make the quartet one of the best-known groups in jazz. That came about despite strong objection from Desmond, who had recommended Morello for the job. Desmond’s preference in drum accompaniment was for discreet time-keeping. At first, that is what Morello provided in rhythm partnership with bassist Norman Bates. “So, it went fine,” Morello told me in 2003,” then we went into the Blue Note for a week.”

From Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, here are excerpts from the longer account of what happened.

That night at the club, Brubeck urged Morello to use sticks and assigned him a solo. Morello said that the solo got “a little standing ovation.” Desmond left the stand for the dressing room. “At the end of the drum solo, he just took off,” Morello said. When Brubeck got there at the end of the set, Desmond wheeled on him and presented an ultimatum: “Morello goes or I go.” Brubeck said, “Well, he’s not going.”

“Joe could do things I’d never heard anybody else do,” Brubeck said. “I wanted to feature him. Paul objected. He wanted a guy who played time and was unobtrusive. I discovered that Joe’s time concept was like mine, and I wanted to move in that direction. Paul said I had to get another drummer, I told him I wouldn’t. I didn’t know whether Paul and Norman would show up the next night. They came to a record session at Columbia in Chicago during the day, but they wouldn’t play. So Joe and I played for three hours. And they told me they were going to leave the group. And I said, ‘well, there’ll be a void on the stand tonight because Joe’s not leaving.’

“So, I went to the job and, boy, was I relieved to see Paul and Norman. But I wasn’t going to be bluffed out of Joe. It was not discussed again. That was the end of it.

What Brubeck described as an “armistice” went into effect, holding Desmond and Morello at arm’s length and continuing after Eugene Wright replaced Bates.

Brubeck was able to make the center hold through all the internecine battles over tempos, volume, and drum fills during Desmond’s solos. Despite their powerful disagreements about how Morello’s skills should be deployed, Brubeck was able to take advantage of the respect Morello and Desmond had for one another’s abilities. The respect was ultimately to grow into genuine affection, but that was at the end of a rough road.

“For a while it was uncomfortable with Paul,” Morello told me. “But as time went on, it worked out. We became very close and used to hang out together. The last four or five years we hung out quite a lot, actually.”

Morello’s skill with unorthodox time signatures allowed Brubeck to undertake the explorations in rhythm that he had long wanted to initiate. They led to the 1959 Time Out album and the group’s enduring hit “Take Five,” written by Desmond, which featured a Morello solo in 5/4 time. The piece became a concert feature for Morello, one that audiences demanded for the rest of the life of the quartet.

Joe Morello would have been 83 in July.

(Added on 3/14): On his JazzWax blog, Marc Myers includes another excerpt from the Desmond biography and a video of Joe demonstrating and explaining his basic brush technique.

(Added on 3/16): On the Brubeck Brothers website, Danny Brubeck writes:

Through a stroke of pure luck, the first drumming I consciously witnessed was Joe Morello’s. He started playing in the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1956 (when I was only one year old) and played in my dad’s group until 1967. By that time, I was all of 12 and a drummer recording and performing in my own right, thanks to his influence.

To read all of Dan Brubeck’s tribute, go here.

Ernie Krivda, Live At The Dirty Dog (CIMPoL).  Except for three years in New York in the 1970s and occasional tours out of town, Krivda has remained in Cleveland during his five decades as a hard-driving soloist, bandleader, composer, arranger and educator. If he had stayed in New York, he might be famous, or as famous as a journeyman jazz musician can become these days. He recorded this, his 36th album, at The Dirty Dog in Grosse Point, Michigan, with a Detroit Rhythm section headed by the veteran pianist Claude Black. The prolific tenor saxophonist plays chorus after chorus on each of four standards and a blues. His ideas flow without repetition even through the album’s longest track, 14-and-a-half minutes of “I’ll Remember April.”

Krivda’s style is centered in a highly individual—even eccentric— treatment of the bebop convention. As I listened to the way he constructs his choruses here, I found myself thinking not of another saxophonist, but of trumpeter Clifford Brown, one of the great improvisational architects. Rather than simply applying occasional accents in strings of eighth notes, Krivda achieves variety by alternating long tones, swoops and declamatory phrases that give his solos the quality of speech. That practice is striking in his solo on “All The Things You Are,” particularly so in the cadenza, where he flies in the face of contemporary hipness and uses a wide vibrato. At moments like that, Krivda shows traces of Coleman Hawkins, his earliest inspiration. Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon may also be on his mind, but only as points of reference; the evolution of his originality is long since complete and his playing is virtually free of cliché. If he had ended “You Stepped Out of a Dream” with his deep-throated exposition of the melody, the performance would have been satisfying, but he goes on to improvise a solo with logic and intensity in perfect balance.

There is a delicious moment following Black’s subtle glissando introduction to “’Round Midnight.” We hear a group of women in the audience continuing their chatter. Krivda holds himself in suspension for several seconds until they get the hint and fall silent. Then he begins the famous melody and plays it with longing that makes you wonder about the source of the ache.

Pianist Black spent much of his career working with singers, including Aretha Franklin. His effectiveness as an accompanist is an important factor here. He solos with imagination, a rich fund of harmonic knowledge and lyrical little turns of phrase. In “A Blues by Any Other Name,” he manages to quote “Old Man River” without being a cornball. Black’s thoroughly compatible rhythm section compadres are bassist Dan Kolton and drummer Renell Gonsalves, the son of Duke Ellington’s tenor saxophone star Paul Gonsalves. Gonsalves’ brush work is impeccable, and he has exquisite timing in the placement of cymbal splashes.

The CD booklet contains an essay by Krivda in which he reflects on the fundamental values that he considers essential to jazz performance. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he writes as well as he plays, but his ideas are powerful and clearly presented.  One of them involves the importance of swinging. I hope that a new generation of jazz players reads them and takes them to heart.

In The Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff reminisces about his relationship with Duke Ellington. The occasion is the release of a massive Mosaic CD box set of early Ellington recordings remastered by Steven Lasker. The column is packed with anecdotes, including this one from the early 1940s, when Hentoff was a young broadcaster in Boston:

Off the air, he once told me: “I don’t want listeners to analyze my music. I want them open to it as a whole.”

And I was there when he played dances, just to get as close to the bandstand as I could. One night, the band played a number entirely new to me. During one of their quick breaks I whispered to a sideman, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, “What’s the name of that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He just wrote it.”

Hentoff gives historical context to his enthusiasm for the Mosaic collection:

During the summer of 1929, the orchestra appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld’s revue “Showgirl.” Its performance roused that legendary producer to call the orchestra “the finest exponent of syncopated music in existence. . . . Some of the best exponents of modern music who have heard them during rehearsal almost jumped out of their seats over their extraordinary harmonies and exciting rhythms.”

Now, thanks to Mosaic, I have almost jumped out of my seat because the sound engineering by Mr. Lasker and Andreas Meyer brings these Ellington orchestras swinging right into the room. As Billy Strayhorn (eventually Ellington’s associate arranger) put it in Down Beat in 1952: “Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each member of the band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect.” That characteristic sound is as present in these recordings as it would later be in the 1940s and beyond.

To read the entire article, go here.

Don’t go away. You’ve come to the right place. This is Rifftides, but with a new design. The publishing platform called WordPress is a significant advance over the old Moveable Type platform. Artsjournal.com founder and editor Doug McLennan has been beta testing WordPress on his own blog. Now he’s helping us switch to the new system. It makes management of the blog easier for the Rifftides staff and—more important—makes the site more enjoyable and efficient for you to navigate. We’re still learning the ropes, but expect to build in new features as we go along.