Archives for November 2006

Good old video keeps surfacing. The new Jazz Icons series of DVDs (about which, more later) is a prime example. Short clips show up on YouTube, Google, Yahoo and whatever new video sites have materialized in the past half hour. A recent addition to the YouTube gallery is a 1961 performance in Holland by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. They play “St. Louis Blues,” for years Brubeck’s concert opener. All hands solo at length following Brubeck’s introduction, beginnning with Paul Desmond’s five choruses overflowing with invented melodies and a couple of borrowed ones. This is prime Desmond about halfway through his nearly two decades with the quartet. Sound and video quality are good. To see and hear the DBQ when “Take Five” had made them even more famous, click on this link.
Watch for terrific closeups of Eugene Wright, smile in full flower, reacting to Brubeck’s solo then continuing to smile through his own. Listen to Desmond make “The Lady in Red” almost fit behind Brubeck’s penultimate sixteen bars before the coda. These guys did have fun.

Like Brahms and Bartók late in their careers, Bob Brookmeyer has achieved increased profundity by clarifying his musical palette. The tensions and conflicts that continued to roil his compositions as he emerged from a period of electronics and experimentation in the first half of the 1990s may not be gone, but if they linger they do not dominate.

Spirit Music, Brookmeyer’s new recording with his New Art Orchestra, includes moments that recall his advanced mainstream writing in the 1960s for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. “Silver Lining” does that. Brookmeyer’s splendid solos on that ebullient piece and the reflective “Alone” leave no doubt that he is still the leading valve trombonist of his time.

On the CD’s five additional tracks, he lays his horn aside and speaks through new compositions for his eighteen-instrument ensemble. “Silver Lining” may suggest the harmonic structure of “Blue Skies,” but his other pieces are compositions in the full sense–not dependent on pre-existing chord patterns or on riffs, but arising from one of the most original minds in the eight-decade history of big jazz band writing. Titles like “New Love,” “Dance For Life” and “Happy Song” indicate that Brookmeyer’s psyche has taken a turn toward tranquility. The music reflects that greater ease, but it has the gravity of experience and wisdom. Brookmeyer approaches his 77th birthday next month with his insights sharpened and his creativity expanding.

The members of the New Art Orchestra, most of them Europeans, all of them supremely talented, “phrase and interpret my music perfectly,” as Brookmeyer puts it in his album notes. Among the impressive soloists are trumpeter Ruud Bruels and tenor saxophonist Nils van Haften. In “New Love,” van Haften creates a dreamy tenor saxophone solo that suggests he is a direct descendant of the Stan Getz of “Early Autumn.” But all of the solos, including Brookmeyer’s own, are in the service of his writing, which has deep textures, pulses with subsurface rhythms, and reflects a passionate soul.

When listeners consign art to categorical boxes, they achieve not exclusivity but exclusion. If they eschew Brookmeyer’s recent work on grounds that it is not jazz as they define it, or as he used to play and write it, they turn their backs on the larger world of music in which he lives, and they miss great satisfactions.

GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

The pig pen smelled like pigs.

–William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.–Maurice Ravel
I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.–Igor Stravinsky
It’s the way you play that makes it . . . Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you’re going to get it. And whatever you get, that’s you, so that’s your story.–Count Basie

Phil Woods responds to John Birchard’s review of his recent Washington, DC, concert:

Hey Doug,
Upon reflection, I think the reviewer missed the point of emphysema – it is Nature’s way of saying – “Stop playing all those 16ths and find a whole note that means something.”
Phil

It’s not too late to put a reminder on your listening calendar. Bob Brookmeyer is the subject on Bill Kirchner’s Jazz From The Archives tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST on WBGO radio, which you will find at 88.3 on your FM dial if you’re in the Newark-New York area and at this address on the internet. Kirchner will survey the music of the valve trombonist and standard-setting composer and arranger. In addition, he promises “a surprise.” A vist from the great man himself, perhaps?

Rifftides reader John Birchard, a Voice of America newscaster, has been attending the Jazz Heritage series of concerts in Washington, DC, and sharing his impressions with us. Here is his latest report. The Rifftides staff has added links to Woods’ recorded performances of some of the pieces John mentions.

Once upon a time, Phil Woods was the hottest alto player on the planet.
Bird was dead. Benny Carter had disappeared into the Hollywood studios. Cannonball Adderley was biding his time with Miles. Johnny Hodges was pretty much coasting in the safety of the Duke Ellington sax section and Paul Desmond was relaxing elegantly in the crook of Brubeck’s piano.
Phil, meantime, was rocketing into orbit from his spot in the Dizzy Gillespie band. It was Phil and Quill. It was Phil featured with Quincy’s band in Europe… Phil scorching on Oliver Nelson’s “More Blues and the Abstract Truth”… Phil the bomb throwing malcontent on Benny Goodman’s Soviet tour… Phil on fire with the European Rhythm Machine… Phil dignifying Billy Joel’s “The Way You Are” (and winning a Grammy) with one of his epigrammatic solos… Phil still smokin’ with his Delaware Water Gap bands.
Philip Wells Woods turned 75 this past week (Nov 2). The ol’ be-bopper has put in a lot of hard miles. He has, as they say in the NFL, lost a step. Emphysema will do that. Rather than routinely exceeding expectations, he now merely meets them…which, when you get to his level, ain’t bad.
The U-S Air Force jazz band, the Airmen of Note, closed out their Jazz Heritage series for 2006 the day after Phil Woods’ birthday by featuring him in concert at Lisner Auditorium on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, DC.
The band set the tone for the evening with a roaring tribute to the late Maynard Ferguson – Don Sebesky’s arrangement of “Take the A Train”, featuring some blistering work from the trumpet section. Vocalist Paige Wroble was up second and swung hard with an oldie, “You Can Have It”, which included a strong tenor sax solo from Tedd Baker.
Then it was time for Woods to hit – and his portion of the evening began with his original “target=”_blank”All Bird’s Children…” showcasing his alto, some nice piano from Steven Erickson and tasty 8’s and 4’s from drummer David McDonald.
Another Woods’ original, dedicated to the memory of Bill Evans, dropped the tempo to ballad pace. “Good-bye, Mister Evans” is a lovely tribute and, mixed blessing that it was, showed both Phil’s wonderful way with a melody and his reduced lung capacity. His phrases are shorter now, less often tossed out with the matchless confidence of his younger days. Not bad, mind you, but for the long-time listener, a melancholy reminder that even the greatest can’t beat the ravages of age. As Phil put it, “Growing old is not for sissies.”
And yet… Woods and the rhythm section trotted through the be-bop national anthem, “How High the Moon” with Phil slipping in some fire, some humor and a cliche or two from his own repertoire. Geoff Reecer was heard to advantage in a guitar solo.
A change of pace found the altoist joined by the sax section only for the Quincy Jones ballad, “The Quintessence“, which Woods claimed he played “four times a night back in the 50s and 60s” as a member of the Jones band. In this case, familiarity bred not contempt, but a lyrical solo and some choice ensemble passages.
A bright Woods original showed off Phil’s composer/arranger skills along with his still-virile alto, plus the Airmen’s ability to zip through a complex chart with equanimity. The largest crowd of the season gave the Grammy winner and the band a standing O and were rewarded with a stunning performance of “High Alto-tude”, featuring Phil and two altos from the band, lead man Lucas Munce and Andy Axelrod. The chart calls for the ability to negotiate breakneck-speed twists and turns in a three-man ensemble and to solo in what amounts to an old-fashioned cutting contest. Woods brought his “A” game to this one, and Munce and Axelrod were up to the challenge, with no one backing away. When it was over, the crowd was yelling, whistling and stomping, and the other band members were grinning and applauding.
So – the Lion in Winter may have to take a couple of hits on his inhaler to get through a performance these days, but he can still jerk an audience to its feet from time to time. And it ain’t nostalgia that does that, pal. That’s the native talent that prompted Dizzy Gillespie to hire the boyish phenom fifty years ago. Long may he wave.
Your Washington correspondent,
John Birchard

Gerry Mulligan became famous well beyond jazz circles for his 1950s quartet that included Chet Baker on trumpet, succeeded by Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. Mulligan achieved universal admiration among musicians and a large following of listeners with his Concert Jazz Band, which flourished in the early 1960s. He frequently said, though, that his greatest musical satisfaction came from the sextet he headed from 1955 through 1958.
The sextet made a brief preview appearance in December of 1954 when Mulligan played a concert at a high school in San Diego, California. On that occasion, Red Mitchell was on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. Then, the quartet with Brookmeyer was still Mulligan’s working band, but nine months later he constituted the sextet as a permanent entity. The front line had Mulligan’s baritone saxophone, Brookmeyer’s trombone, Zoot Sims’ tenor saxophone and Jon Eardley’s trumpet. The bassist was Peck Morrison, the drummer Dave Bailey. Eardley was replaced for a short time near the end of the band’s life by Don Ferrara, Morrison by Bill Crow. The sextet recorded three twelve-inch LPs on the Emarcy label, none of which the company ever reissued on CD. Verve, which bought the Emarcy masters, now offers one of the albums as a web site digital download.
All of the Mulligan Sextet recordings, including the San Diego concert first issued by Pacific Jazz, are in a new three-CD box on Spain’s Fresh Sound Label. To find it, go here. The set is also available here. It is called The Fabulous Gerry Mulligan Sextet. The hyperbole of the title is justified. Mulligan’s leadership molded the six men into a unit capable of bringing to life the ambitious vision he laid out in his compositions and arranging. They combined the spontaneity of a freewheeling jam session with the disciplined performance of a chamber group. Because of Mulligan’s voicings, the horn lines that he layered and intertwined, and the intensely close relationships among the players, the group often sounds twice its size. The critic Ralph J. Gleason once characterized the effect of the sextet’s horns at their most rambunctious as “a boiling and bubbling stew which can raise me right off the floor.”
The pieces include Mulligan’s “Apple Core,” “Nights at the Turntable” and “Elevation,” Jerry Lloyd’s “Mud Bug,” Eardley’s “Demanton” (read it backward), and Mulligan’s ingenious treatments of standards. Two Duke Ellington medleys, the impressionistic “La plus que lente” and a glorious “Sweet and Lovely” are highlights of an album of highlights. There is not a dull moment in thirty-seven tracks. Among other attributes, these sextet recordings have some of the most inspired and ebullient Zoot Sims on record, compelling statements by Brookmeyer in the gruff-old-man style of his youth, and Mulligan’s baritone in full, majestic bloom. Eardley, with his fleet lines and slightly acerbic tone, fit perfectly with his more famous colleagues.
Later, Mulligan formed other sextets of various instrumentations. The enchanting Night Lights has the one with Brookmeyer, trumpeter Art Farmer and guitaritst Jim Hall. But there was never another Mulligan sextet that had quite the vivacity and sense of discovery of the band with Sims, Brookmeyer and Eardley. The digital remastering and reissue production by Dick Bank give the recordings greater depth and brilliance than they had in their original format. This welcome CD reissue of an important chapter in modern American music has been needed for a long time.
Coming soon: a few thoughts about Brookmeyer’s latest, Spirit Music.

Referring to the WKCR Lennie Tristano Festival and, on the other hand, the general white bread-with-mayonnaise quality of most radio today, particularly in regard to jazz, DevraDoWrite, observes:

I know a lot of dee-jays who are nearly in tears because their bosses, not wanting them to break the musical spell with any talk, won’t even allow them to tell us listeners who’s playing on a particular track let alone mention that the artist might be appearing in town.

Amen. Maybe it’s time to again lower on the pabulum purveyors and their consultants who run most radio operations, public and private. Not that it ever does much good. Apparently, listeners are getting what they want, or they would rise up against mediocrity. To read all of Devra’s posting, go here.

As I write this, I’m hearing Lennie Tristano talk about his admiration for Charlie Parker. The archived 1973 interview with Tristano, who died in 1978, is a part of a four-day celebration of his music by WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University. WKCR is billing it as a Tristano festival. It will run through noon EST on Saturday, November 11.
Tristano just said:

I had the best possible opportunity of anybody in the forties and fifties, because I was the only one who wasn’t doing what Bird was doing.

Tristano admirers undoubtedly know about the marathon broadcast and are listening. Those unfamiliar with his importance will be enlightened. In the New York area, tune your radio to 89.9 FM. In the rest of the world, the streaming audio is available on the web. Go here and click on “Live Broadcast” at the bottom of the page.
The following paragraphs are from the station’s news release.

A pivotal and often overlooked figure in jazz, Lennie Tristano was a virtuosic pianist whose singular achievements in performance, composition and teaching continue to resonate in today’s world. Born in 1919 in Chicago, he immersed himself in the New York scene at a time when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were in the midst of their revolutionary collaborations. Tristano quickly integrated into the bebop community and went on to build a musical world based on a distinct concept of improvisation.
Our festival seeks to present the many sides of Tristano’s genius. In addition to an airing of his entire recorded output, there will be in depth features on his compositional techniques and teaching methodology, as well as interviews with the former colleagues and students of Tristano who represent his living legacy.
The festival will include a chronological presentation of Tristano’s complete discography, presented uninterrupted throughout the day of Friday, November 10th.

The Rifftides staff encourages comments about the broadcast and about Tristano. Please use the comment link at the bottom of this posting or send an e-mail message to the address in the right column.

A recurring theme of this blog is the universality and remarkably consistent quality of jazz in nearly every precinct of the globe. Jay Thomas has done his part to not only stimulate the growth of that quality abroad, but also to see that those of us in the music’s homeland get to hear the new generation of players from abroad. The trumpeter-saxophonist-flutist-leader and international sojourner spends a good deal of time in Japan and frequently imports his Japanese colleagues to work with him in the US.
A few days ago, Thomas’s East/West Jazz Alliance kicked off Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Festival with a concert at City Hall. In addition to Thomas, the band has pianist John Hansen, bassist Phil Sparks, alto saxophonist Atsushi Ikeda, tenor saxophonist Yasahiro Kohama and drummer Daisuke Kurata. Seattle’s remarkably hip municipal website has streaming video of the concert–nearly an hour long. To see it, go here. The Thomas concert is the first item.
Scrolling down the page, you will find video performances by The Tiptons, the energetic all-female saxophone quartet and drummer; and a stimulating set by the veteran trombonist Julian Priester’s quartet, which includes the rising young pianist Dawn Clement. Immediately below the Thomas video is the link to a November 12 recital by pianist Byron Schenkman with Mozart’s delicate Sonata in D-minor K31, and a set of Schubert’s compelling late piano pieces performed with notable vigor.
Seattlites can conduct their municipal business at city hall, then stop by the atrium for live music. There are compensations for living with all that rain.
Jay Thomas will be taking an edition of the East/West Jazz Alliance into The Seasons Saturday, November 11. I will have the pleasure of introducing the band. If you find yourself in Yakima, Washington, that night and attend the concert, please make yourself known.

Thanks to Bob Young of Jazz Boston for adding Rifftides to the links from the site, which chronicles jazz people and events in the Boston area and includes Carol Sloane, Joe Lovano, Danilo Perez, Terri Lynn Carrington and Charlie Kohlhase on its board of artistic advisers. They must be giving good advice; it is a web site with good design, sensible organization, extensive information and hip background music .
Thanks to Mr. Young, also, for including among Jazz Boston’s links one to a collection of pieces Tony Gieske has written and illustrated with his photographs over the years. Gieske, once with The Washington Post, now writes for the Hollywood Reporter. His site is called Remembrance of Swings Past. It has columns, essays, and anecdotes about Woody Herman, Miles Davis, Tiny Grimes, Jimmy Rowles, Ravi Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Sam Rivers, Peggy Lee, Charles Lloyd Conte Candoli, Chet Baker, the young trumpeter Maurice Brown and a couple of dozen others. Gieske is good at description:

Brookmeyer poked the mike deep into the bell of his instrument and began producing that drawly, equable sound of his, buzzy and furry and intimate. The brilliant guitarist Larry Koonse, immaculate and cool, gave the sound a silvery core as the two exposed the text of whatever familiar theme they had chosen.

Gieske has an ear for quotes, like this one from a profile of Annie Ross, the heroine of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross:

The other day I was walking along Madison Avenue and I passed a police station and a black policeman came out off duty and he’s walking up the street singing ‘Moody’s Mood for Love.’ He did the female chorus, the whole thing, walking along Madison Avenue. Out of sight! I was thrilled.

And this one from Tiny Grimes recalling New York in 1944:

I had a little job with my quartet down on 52nd Street, and Charlie Parker used to come in, and I used to let him play, you know? He couldn’t get a job nowhere because nobody at that time understood the music. But I could dig it. I just couldn’t play it that well.
But Bird was there every night. He was there so often, they thought he was workin’ there. And then when I got this record date for my group, the producer at Savoy over in New Jersey – he really didn’t want him. I talked him into it. It was Parker’s first real record date, where somebody let him play.

I am adding Jazz Boston and Remembrance of Swings Past to the links in the right-hand column. Pay them a visit. Don’t forget to come back.

In the recent Rifftides piece about Freedom and Josef Skvorecky, I named several jazz musicians from former Communist countries who have risen to the top of their profession. One of them was the Czech pianist Emil Viklický.
The world is small and tightly interconnected. A day or two after the piece appeared, I got a message from Viklický informing me that he knows Skvorecky “quite well” and that he contributed an important element to a masterly–and very funny–Skvorecky novel. Emil wrote:

There is my long letter to him, written in 1974 to Canada, published as a
resolution of novel The Engineer of Human Souls.

The Engineer of Human Souls rambles through life under the Nazis, the Communists, academia and the human condition. In this brilliant roman á clef, the narrator, a Czech professor of literature teaching in Toronto, is Skvorecky once removed. One of the characters from his Czech past is his friend Benno Manes, described by Viklický in his message as “dirty speaking fabulous trumpetist.” Viklický discloses that Manes’ had a counterpart in real life.

Skvorecky of course changed all real names to fictive names. It was necessary back in 1974. The letter describes the death of Pavel Bayerle, bandleader, trumpeter, a close friend of Skvorecky. I was in army big band in October 1971 when Bayerle died of heart attack on the stage while conducting the band in Russian-occupied army barracks in Olomouc. Bayerle was 47 then. My letter to Josef remained in the novel practically intact. Skvorecky received my letter just when he was finishing Engineer.
Skvorecky changed Olomouc army barracks to Bratislava Russian barracks. In Russian barracks, we often played longer improvisations mostly ending in aggresive free music. It was our kind of protest. We knew that Russian listeners didn’t like it that way.

As it appears in the book, the letter mentions a singer, Miluska Paterjzlova; a guitarist named Karel Kozel, “a big handsome fellow with a green Gibson;” the MC, Private Hemele; and a trumpeter called Pavel Zemecnik who helps the letter writer, “Desmosthenes,” pull the stage curtain closed when Benno Manes dies as he is conducting. They were fictional names of Viklicky’s real bandmates.

Real singer name was Helena Foltynova, lately married as Helena Viktorinova, still singing some backgrounds for pop stars now. She was Marilin Monroe type of beauty, at the time simply stunning. Guitarist real name was Zdenek Fanta, his Gibson was dark red colour. Private Hemele is well-known actor Jan Kanyza; Trumpeter, who closed yellow curtain from the other side, was Petr Fink. Bayerle died in the 5th bar of letter D of his own song.

From the letter about Benno Manes’ death in Skvorecky’s novel:

The last thing I remember, and I’ll never forget it, was how he was lying there in that empty hall on an empty stage, with his huge belly completely purple, and dark grey trousers, and you couldn’t see his head for the stomach, and all around there was yellow bunting, that awful yellow bunting. Yellow and purple, maybe the bust of some statesman behind it but all I could see when I looked into the hall for the last time was that ghastly purple stomach and the yellow bunting. Then we left for Prague.
I thought you might be interested in how your friend died.

They went on to become friends, the novelist emerging as a major literary figure; the pianist about to leave the army, devote himself to jazz and become one of Europe’s most famous jazz musicians. Viklicky adds:

When my quartet played in Chicago in 1991, Skvorecky came down from Toronto and stayed with the band for a few days. I think he was fascinated by musicians’ talk, because he stayed through rehearsals as well. Backstage slang in ’91 was probably different than back in the ’40s when Skvorecky was young. But he seemed to love to listen to it. And maybe put it into his next novel.

Yes, the world is small and tightly interconnected.

When they played The Seasons the other night, it had been nine months since I heard alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s quartet. I was impressed with the band at the Portland Jazz Festival and with Zenón’s Jíbaro CD. In Feburary, the leader’s fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cole had recently replaced the formidable Antonio Sánchez on drums and was working into the group. Cole’s working-in is long past. The band has the cohesion, mutuality of direction and sense of purpose that come when performance together night after night settles individual players into a unit.
Zenón, Cole, bassist Hans Glawischnig and pianist Luis Perdomo are without question a unit. Playing to a hinterlands audience unsure of what to expect from a band most of them had neither heard nor heard of, Zenón took the bold step of performing the tunes in each of two sets without interruption. Before intermission, all of the pieces but two new compositions, “Camarón” and “Penta” were from the Jíbaro album. In the second set, the music consisted only of fresh music by Zenón, unified in the form of a suite.
I could sense surprise and mild discomfort in the hall when the playing in the first set had continued without a break for fifteen or twenty minutes. Gradually, the content of Zenón’s music, the band’s intensity and the passion of the soloing created the awareness that this was chamber music of a high order; captivating chamber music flowing with Latin pulses, lyricism and yearning, fed by jazz sensibility and swing. Zenón’s playing is unlike that of any other young alto saxophonist of whom I am aware. He has the potential to become one of those soloists–not uncommon a couple of generations ago–whom the average listener can recognize after a few notes. Cole is an equally distinctive player. The four members of the band interact with almost eery interconnectedness inside complex music made to sound natural and easy.
I have frequently commented here on the regrettable trend of knee-jerk standing ovations. If everything deserves a standing ovation, nothing deserves one. When the concert ended, there was a long standing ovation full of shouts and whistles. The Zenóns deserved it.
The new pieces that made up that entrancing second half were “Ulysses in Slow Motion,” “Santo,” “Lamamilla” and “3rd Dimension.” None has been recorded. Zenón told me that he hopes to take the band into the studio early next year and incorporate the new music into a CD. Good.