Archives for January 2010

Seamus Blake, Bellwether (Criss Cross). Since 1993, when Seamus Blake was 22, Gerry Teekens of Criss Cross Records has been traveling from Holland to New York to record the gifted Canadian tenor saxophonist. Teekens was one of the first recording executives to document Blake’s work, and he has been doing it ever since. Bellwether is Blake’s sixth Criss Cross album as a leader. He has been a sideman on 16 others. That is hardly overexposure for a musician of his inventiveness. Blake’s technique makes him one of the fastest tenors since Johnny Griffin. His speed can be dazzling, but he employs it in the service of the stories he tells in his solos, not merely for display. Often, he spins out his inventions in long, lyrical lines, as in “A Beleza Que Vem” and “The Song That Lives Inside,” two of his five compositions on the CD. The remaining tracks are John Scofield’s “Dance Me Home” and the third movement of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. Blake included the second movement of the quartet on his previous recording. The liner notes quote him as saying that he treats the Debussy movement as if it is a tune, “and we create a solo section out of some of the chords and loop that area. I guess you could say we sort of ‘jazzify’ it.” Yes, you could say that. Blake’s quintet includes his longtime collaborator pianist David Kikoski, guitarist Lage Lund, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Bill Stewart. Blake often works in Stewart’s band. Whether it is the result of intensive rehearsal or of sympathetic listening among close colleagues, this band has a sense of contrast that is welcome in an age when many jazz groups operate on one dynamic level.
Kenny Dorham, The Flamboyan, Queens, NY, 1963 (Uptown). This broadcast recording is a treasure unearthed after 47 years. Alan Grant, who hosted the broadcast from an obscure club in an outer borough of New York City, preserved the tape of the program. It documents the early stage of the partnership between Dorham, one of the great trumpet soloists of the bebop and post-bop eras, and the young tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. Among the herd of Coltrane clones, Henderson was beginning in the early 60s to attract attention as an individual voice. He went on to be recognized as a modern master of the instrument. The pair made two Blue Note albums together under Dorham’s leadership, three under Henderson’s and one under Andrew Hill’s. This unexpected and welcome preview of their symbiosis deserves a place alongside the Blue Notes.
Dorham’s solo on “Dorian” includes a quote from “I Get The Neck of the Chicken,” an unlikely insertion into a modal piece and typical of his subtle wit. The lyricism of his work on “I Can’t Get Started,” “Summertime” and an early version of his composition “Una Mas” is based in the warmth of his sound and the depth of his unique exploitation of chords. It is a reminder of why nearly half a century later Dorham is an influence on the harmonic thinking of young players. Henderson, fully formed by 1963, solos with daring, passion and tonal qualities that make him immediately recognizable. The rhythm section of pianist Ronnie Matthews, bassist Steve Davis and drummer J.C. Moses is solid and effective despite Matthews having to accommodate to a horrid piano. The CD presents the club performance intact as a broadcast. Grant’s announcements are on tracks that can be programmed out by those who don’t want to hear them on repeated listenings, but they are reminders that there was a time when little clubs presented major players and radio stations did live remotes.
Sam Sadigursky, words project iii miniatures (New Amsterdam). As we pointed out in a Rifftides posting two years ago today, jazz and poetry never really became a movement. Over the past 90 years or so, the hybrid form has had a few peak periods and some embarrassing lows. On the strength of Sam Sadigursky’s work, we may be at one of the peaks. This is Sadigursky’s third CD of poetry set to music or, to be more accurate, poetry integrated with music. His voice, guitar and reeds are in play, along with the voice, trumpet and keyboards of Michael Leonhart. They also use a collection of miscellaneous instruments including Sadigursky’s glockenspiel and Leonhart’s pump organ and waterphone.
Sadigursky employs several womens’ voices to read poetry by Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Maxim Gorky, Kenneth Patchen, contemporary poets David Ignatow, Maureen N. McLane, Sadi Ranson-Polizzetti and others. The poems are rightly described as miniatures because of their length, not their ideas. This is a far cry from a band wailing a blues as a poet reads. There seems to be little improvisation except in the readers’ timing, phrasing and inflections. Yet, the work generally has the feeling of jazz spontaneity. Ignatow’s brief “Content” becomes a wordscape of intersecting lines. Gorky’s “O Muzyke Tostykh” is his late 1920s screed against the middle class infatuation with jazz, which he called the music of degenerates. Sadigursky sets it to a background voiced in minor for bass clarinets, flute, trumpet, glockenspiel and percussion. Through repetition, the four lines of Williams’s “El Hombre” become a mantra riding on the insistence of light Latin rhythm. And so it goes, each poem treated differently, each rewarding the listener’s attention and effort.
BRIEFLY
John Stowell, Anson Wright, The Sky At Our Feet. Anson Wright, Tim Gilson, Ukiah’s Lullaby (Open Path). All of the poetry on The Sky At Our Feet is by Wright. It evokes the beauty and mystery of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in the American desert Southwest. John Stowell reads the poems and accompanies himself on guitar, in some cases overdubbing instruments so that the starkly etched imagery of Wright’s words stands out against the ripples and shimmers of Stowell’s music and what Wright’s web site calls “light electronic scores.” Those augmentations don’t detract from Stowell’s rich backgrounds. A sensitive and resourceful guitarist turns out to be a fine speaker of poetry.
Wright is a guitarist as well as a poet. In that role, he devotes Ukiah’s Lullaby to duets with bassist Gilson. Six of the tunes are his, four Gilson’s. Wright’s “Orion” has the flavor of the kind of modal structures Miles Davis pioneered with “Milestones” and “So What.” They enhance harmonic interest through the spareness of Wright’s strategic chords and melody lines and Gilson’s tuning of his bass in fifths a la the late Red Mitchell. Gilson’s ballad “Sometimes There Are No Words” is beautifully bowed by the bassist.
Mike Longo Trio, Sting Like A Bee (CAP). The remarkable, and remarkably unheralded, pianist’s new CD is a sequel to his –what else?– Float Like A Butterfly of 2007. The Oscar Peterson protégé and Dizzy Gillespie rhythm section stalwart stings as effectively as he floats, opening with Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” and closing unaccompanied with a righteously two-fisted take on Gillespie’s “Kush.” Along the way, Longo, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Lewis Nash explore pieces by Clifford Brown, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein and Cole Porter. They combine delicacy and strength in a compelling treatment of Clare Fisher’s “Morning” and radiate Charlie Parker’s bop spirit in Longo’s “Bird Seed,” which could profitably have gone on much longer. Riches are unlikely for jazz musicians, but Longo surely deserves a bigger portion of fame.

If you feel the urge, don’t be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for, anyway? – Will Rogers

Tonight I heard the wild goose cry,

Wingin’ north in the lonely sky.

Tried to sleep, it weren’t no use,

‘Cause I am a brother to the old wild goose.

— 1950 hit record for Frankie Laine, music and lyrics by Terry Gilkyson

If you are puzzling over the course jazz is taking in the second decade of the new century, this would be a good weekend to be in New York at the Winter Jazzfest. The event is packed with young artists making waves that excite fans their ages and younger, and frustrate many older listeners who have rigid convictions about what constitutes jazz. There is a wide range of musicians and styles, but the prevailing direction is forward, not back. It is an intriguing festival that has Jenny Scheinman, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Jason Moran and Linda Oh under the same umbrella. The festival takes place in several Greenwich Village clubs. Nate Chinen’s piece in The New York Times summarizes what listeners can expect. Here is one of his descriptions:

Ms. Scheinman, a violinist, and Mr. Moran, a pianist, both favor a direct but slightly warped sense of melody, balancing the rustic and the urbane. Their duo rapport should be a genuine conversation.

To read the whole article, go here. To help you get in the mood for some of what you might encounter if you attend, this video has Ms. Scheinman with bassist Ben Allison’s band at the Jazz Standard last fall. Allison is also on the festival this weekend. Shane Endsley is the trumpeter, Steve Cardenas the guitarist, Rudy Royston the drummer.

A memorial service for Stacy Rowles is set for Sunday, January 10, in the auditorium of the Musicians Union local in Hollywood, California. The growing list of more than fifty musicians who will perform in tribute includes Pete Christlieb, Joe LaBarbera, Charlie and Sandi Shoemake, Gary Foster and Mike Melvoin. The trumpeter and singer died in late October of injuries from an automobile accident. She was the daughter of pianist Jimmy Rowles.
The affair will start at 11:00 a.m. and run into the evening. From the organizers’ invitation:

Please be our guest, we’ll be serving tri-tip and chicken with beer, wine and softer things at the bar. If you make a dish you are proud of, you are welcome to bring a taste for the table. One of the rules of the house when Stacy entertained was ‘nobody leaves hungry’, and we never did!

Rifftides reader Ty Newcomb sent a link to video of the Dutch singer Fay Claassen doing Gerry Mulligan’s “Line for Lyons.” After enjoying it, I noticed that YouTube has another version of the piece by The Dave Brubeck Quintet. What to do? Why, show you both, of course.
First, we see and hear the composer with Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jack Six and Alan Dawson at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1972. The director goes berserk with reverse zooms out of the stage lights, but a little dizziness is a small price to pay for a fine performance. Brubeck enjoys the work of his compadres and joins them in a round (so to speak) of counterpoint. Mulligan, sporting his old-man-of-the-mountains look that year, wrote and recorded the tune in the key of G 20 years before, but Desmond preferred it in B-flat and that’s where they play it here.

If you’re keeping track, Fay Claassen also chooses B-flat. She plays Chet Baker to Jan Menu’s Mulligan in an arrangement that thrives on tempo changes. Hein van de Geyn is the bassist. John Engels is on drums.

Among her other accomplishments, Ms. Claasen is a Chet Baker specialist. This double CD is devoted to her interpretations of his trumpet solos and his vocals.

On his JazzWax blog, Marc Myers begins a series about pianist Dick Hyman. What a good idea. The first installment of the interview adds a video clip of Hyman and Billy Taylor doing a two-piano duet on “Hot House.” If you thought Hyman played only Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, read Marc’s interview, then watch that clip.

Gary Peacock and Marc Copland, Insight. Marc Copland, Alone (Pirouet). Copland’s previous explorations on the fine German label Pirouet were four trio CDs and one by a quartet. In these new ones, he pares down personnel but not his signature keyboard touch, melodic inventiveness or harmonic astringency. Peacock, the brilliant bassist, gets top billing in the duo album, but he and Copland are full partners. Laced with chance-taking adventure, their interaction nonetheless produces an overall sense of contemplation and ease. The polish and unity of six compositions with joint credit to Peacock and Copland make it impossible to be sure which parts are written and which spontaneously created. Other provocative performances are of “All Blues” and “Blue in Green,” associated with Miles Davis; a spritely take on Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way;” Copland’s “River Run,” all shimmer and mystery; and Peacock jauntily plucking the lead in the 80-year-old standard, “Sweet and Lovely.”
Copland goes it Alone beginning with a softly insistent A-natural struck beneath the melody of Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes.” As the piece blooms, he returns to the ostinato now and then, a remembrance of things past. The figure helps frame the performance’s sense of longing or nostalgia that continues through Joni Mitchell’s “I Don’t Know Where I Stand.” Later, two other Mitchell songs become parts of an expressive whole in which Copland combines ten discrete compositions into a suite centered in wistfulness but not, perhaps, regret. His “Night Whispers,” “Into The Silence” and “Blackboard” are facets in the pensiveness, as are meditative abstractions on Stordahl and Weston’s “I Should Care,” Wayne Shorter’s “Fall,” and Bronislau Kaper’s “Hi Lili Hi Lo” bringing us to the end with another ostinato, this time in C-major.
A news release that arrived with the CD has a quote from Copland.

There’s no cut and dried technique other than this:
The desire, when playing, not to hit a single note or a single chord unless
It has a certain touch, a certain blend, a certain feel.

Copland has all of that, and these albums have staying power.
Freddie Hubbard, Without A Song (Blue Note). This collection of concert performances in England, previously unissued, captures the entire trumpeter. That means you get the daring explorer of chords, the exhibitionist technician and the balladeer who could break hearts with his lyricism. There are moments, as on “Space Track,” in which Hubbard is so unrestrained as to overwhelm the listener. There are others, notably in a long, wondrous version of “The Things We Did Last Summer,” when his tenderness makes you forgive him anything. The discovery of the music on this CD helps fill out a vital chapter of Hubbard’s touring career and makes his loss a year ago all the more regrettable. It is a logical companion to his MPS studio album The Hub of Hubbard, also recorded in December, 1969. The rhythm section is nearly the same in both, pianist Roland Hanna and drummer Louis Hayes, with Ron Carter on bass in England and Richard Davis in Germany.
BRIEFLY
Dan Nimmer, Yours Is My Heart Alone (Venus). The fleet young pianist of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra recruits the ace rhythm team of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash for an eclectic mix of standards, jazz classics and two of his own pieces. Surprise: Nimmer’s joyous treatment of the Gil Evans rarity “Jambangle.” No surprise: the bow to his hero Oscar Peterson with Peterson’s arrangement of the title tune. Special treats: Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo,” with a powerful Washington bass solo, and a driving “Falling in Love With Love.”
Sachal Vasandani, We Move (MackAvenue). Vasandani’s singing faintly suggests Kurt Elling, but that is less a matter of emulation than a similarity of attitude toward material. Without making an attempt, always doomed, to define jazz singing, suffice it to say that Vasandani does it and does it well. Jazz is in his phrasing, intonation and dynamics, whether on a chestnut like “Don’t Worry About Me” or his own songs “Every Ocean, Every Star” and the title tune. His voice has a reedy quality that maintains through the registers of his considerable range and his note manipulations.
Bob Green, St. Peter Street Strutters (Delmark). Bob Green is a pianist from New York, one of the world’s most dedicated Jelly Roll Morton specialists, now 88. He recorded this album at Preservation Hall in 1964 when he was visiting New Orleans. He plays the whey out of “Wolverine Blues,” “The Pearls,” “Sweet Substitute,” King Oliver’s “Snake Rag” and W.C. Handy’s “Atlanta Blues,” among others; fifteen pieces in all. The band’s unusual instrumentation is piano, cornet (Ernie Carson), banjo (Steve Larner) and tuba (Shorty Johnson). I hadn’t listened to Green for years and put this on wondering if he was as much fun as I remembered. He was.

I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don’t even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style, hell, they’re all Jelly Roll style. –Jelly Roll Morton

When Jelly Roll said that he wrote his first jazz tunes in 1902, or that he used scat-singing as far back as 1907, there is not only no proof to the contrary, but Jelly’s own considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation. –Gunther Schuller in Early Jazz

He could back up everything he said by what he could do. –Omer Simeon

Film producer Andrew Thomas writes with news of what perhaps everyone but Jack Berry and I knew:

Like many fans of Vince Guaraldi, I make sure that Google sends me an alert every time he’s mentioned in posts and blogs, so I was directed to this Rifftides page.
I was surprised by your suggestion that there is little evidence of Vince on film or tape. There is actually a decent amount, and much of it is included in the feature-length documentary I premiered with my partner Toby Gleason at the Monterey Jazz Festival last September — including Vince on screen performing “Star Song” (with Bola Sete both in studio and live at the Trident), “Treat Street”, “Samba de Orpheus”, and more…. as well as film of Vince rehearsing with the choir for the Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass, and performing on the road at various universities. (These are beyond the three Jazz Casual programs on which he appeared, and all of it restored and transferred in high definition… unlike those YouTube clips that someone ripped-off and posted without regard to quality or copyright.)
Of course, it’s not hours of performance footage… but the program is scored using rare unpublished Vince recordings (from his private collection), as well as new performances by George Winston, Jon Hendricks and several others, and conversations with Dave Brubeck, John Handy, Dick Gregory, and… well, there are quite a few people who participated. Vince himself is featured in extensive on camera interviews as well.
The film is called “The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi”, and more information can be found at http://www.anatomyofvinceguaraldi.com
We’re hoping that it will be in release both theatrically and on home video this year, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

If that happens, I’ll look forward to reviewing the film.

On a New Years eve in the mid-1960s, my wife and I attended a dance with music by Duke Elllington. At midnight, Ellington nodded casually and the band concocted a head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” that sounded very much like this. As you listen, please accept the wishes of the Rifftides staff for a perfect 2010.