Archives for October 2010

It could have been worse—toxic red sludge, for instance.
The technician just left after performing CPR on the internet connection, which was out of commission for 48 hours. The Rifftides staff will resume posting soon. Now, ears open wide and notebook in hand, we’re off to The Seasons for the next concerts of the Fall Festival. This afternoon,Tom Harrell’s quintet and pianist Bill Mays are performing Harell, Antheil and Gershwin with the Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra. Tonight, it’s the Mays trio with Martin Wind and Matt Wilson.
In the meantime, if Thelonious Monk were alive he would be celebrating his 93rd birthday. Let us all celebrate Monk. This 1966 performance of “Blue Monk” with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley has been viewed 1,140,150 times. No wonder.

The Rifftides global headquarters’ internet connection is currently flooded. We’ll be back when the water recedes

Continuing the not quite helter-skelter survey of recent recordings that we began last week, here are four more worth your attention:
Ted Rosenthal, Impromptu (Playscape). Rosenthal interprets classical composers’ themes with respect, but he is not reluctant to add or subtract an element to make them work for improvisation. The pianist, bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Quncy Davis approach pieces by Bach, Schubert and Brahms as they would those by other revered composers—say, Monk, Ellington and Mulligan. Rosenthal found that only the main strain of Chopin’s Nocturne in F minor suited the trio’s purpose, so that’s what they blow on. It becomes a gorgeous standard ballad from the Great Polish Songbook. Tchaikovsky’s “June,” the Barcarolle in G minor from The Seasons, has undertones of blues and parallel-hands passages reminiscent of Erroll Garner or Lennie Tristano. Rosenthal gives the Brahms Intermezzo in B Flat minor an overt blues treatment, with a lunging samba feel in the rhythm. The Schubert Impromptu in G flat goes from 6/8 to 4/4 and culminates in a stunning role reversal of the hands as Rosenthal plays the melody in the bass clef and decorates it with lightning runs on top. The trio also get their licks in with Mozart, Puccini, Bach and Schumann. This is not the tiresome foolery that used to be called “jazzing the classics.” It is serious music making on substantial material, and it is great fun.
Regina Carter, Reverse Thread (E1). There are moments on violinist Carter’s most recent CD that evoke Cajun music, Brazilian choro, Cuban danzon, even the feeling of an Appalachian hoedown. Carter’s inspiration for this collection, hoedown perhaps aside, is from the African sources of much music we often assume to be from South America or the Caribbean. She spent three years and part of her half-million-dollar MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant researching African music, traveling to the continent to immerse herself in it. The result is a dozen pieces with enormous variety. Most are interpretations of traditional music, or songs by composers from Kenya, Senegal, Mali and South Africa. Carter’s composition “Day Dreaming on the Niger” blends into the flow of the African pieces. Yacouba Sissoko, a virtuoso of the 21-stringed Malian kora, is effective on five tracks, but the African atmospherics and the authenticity don’t depend on him. Carter, bassist Chris Lightcap, guitarist Adam Rogers, accordionists Gary Versace and Will Holshouser, and drummer Alvester Garnett have absorbed the ethos and rhythms of the music. Through it all is the incomparably rich violin and imagination of Regina Carter.
Billy Bang, Prayer For Peace (TUM). In an album mostly of his own compositions, the violinist opens with Stuff Smith’s “Only Time Will Tell.” Bang and trumpeter James Zollar might be summoning the spirits of the seminal jazz violinist Smith (1909-1967) and his Onyx Club sidekick of the 1930s, Jonah Jones. The rest of the CD is redolent of the music Bang has made with Sun Ra, Don Cherry, the bassist Sirone and others in the avant garde, and of his love for John Coltrane. That is not to say that it is experimental or inaccessible. Even at its most daring, Bang’s music has always had an engaging old-timey quality that he transmits to those who play with him, including Zollar, bassist Todd Nicholson, pianist Andrew Bemkey and drummer Newman Taylor-Baker, the band of young musicians he has employed for some years. The title tune, just short of 20 minutes, runs in a tranquil modal course that reflects the quest for peace that Bang has promoted with music since his experience in the Viet Nam war. Bang’s danceable version of “Chan Chan,” the Afro-Cuban anthem made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, is among the pleasures here. The Finnish record company TUM lavished commendable care on the sonic production and packaging of this CD.
Jeff Chang, It’s Not What You Think (Chee May). Chang came to the United States from Taiwan in his teens. He studied at the New England Conservatory with George Russell, George Garzone and Steve Lacy, among others, and emerged a fresh voice on alto saxophone. His debut CD is impressive for his big sound, his broad conceptual range, the quartet’s cohesiveness and the quality of his original compositions. In any given piece, Chang is likely to go from lyrical melody to mutual quartet improvisation full of risk and exhilaration. Fellow NEC grads pianist Carmen Staaf, bassist Kendall Eddy and drummer Austin McMahon are his empathetic rhythm section. Staaf’s touch, subtle way with chords and firm time interact intriguingly with Chang’s post-bop inventiveness.

Among the dozens of musicians either already here or headed toward my current home town for the eight days of The Seasons Fall Festival are Tom Harrell and his quintet, Bill Mays, Martin Wind, Matt Wilson, Scott Robinson, the African percussion expert Michael Wimberly, composer Daron Hagen and a raft of classical players, composers and conductors. Thursday evening I heard Harrell rehearsing his Wise Children suite with the Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra. Whew. It’s something to look forward to. For the schedule and details of the festival, go here.
Robinson will appear with Wilson and singer-pianist Dee Daniels in Wind’s group. Coincidentaly, Bill Kirchner is devoting his radio program this weekend to Robinson and his menagerie of every instrument known to man. That’s only a slight exaggeration. Here’s Kirchner’s listening advisory:

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives”
series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every
Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3) in the New York-New Jersey area.
Jazz has had some remarkable multi-instrumentalists, but probably none with
the scope of Scott Robinson (b. 1959). A short list of his instruments includes saxophones (from sopranino to contrabass), flutes, clarinets, trumpet, trombone and theremin–all played on a world-class level. And he is comfortable in jazz idioms ranging from the 1920s to the avant-garde.
We’ll hear Robinson playing with the Bob Brookmeyer, Tom Pierson, and Maria Schneider orchestras, as well as with drummer Klaus Suonsaari and his own small groups.
The show will air this Sunday, October 10, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.
NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also
broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

If you are attending The Seasons Fall Festival, I’ll be around. Please say hello. I may even take notes and post a report or two on Rifftides.

While the Rifftides staff prepares the next installment of In Breve, we don’t want you to feel abandoned. We have been holding the following video for just such an occasion—Benny Green, piano; Ray Brown,bass; Jeff Hamilton, drums; and the WDR Big Band conducted by John Clayton, in 1994, playing Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail.” In the right hands, “I Got Rhythm’s” harmonic changes never grow old. Green has moments in which he might be the reincarnation of Bud Powell. The saxophone section brings back Ben Webster.

Rifftides reader Garret Gannuch practices pediatric radiology in Denver. When he moved to Colorado, his Louisiana soul went with him. A week ago, Dr. Gannuch traveled into the country south of Denver to hear a fellow New Orleanian. He knew that, like nearly anyone who’s ever lived there, I’ll never get over my love affair with New Orleans and he wrote me about the experience. I asked him if I could let you in on it. He said yes. Here is his report.

I attended a solo piano concert by Henry Butler at the Cherokee Ranch and Castle in Douglas Country, Colorado. The setting couldn’t be better. The music is presented on a ranch amid more than 3,000 preserved acres south of Denver in a beautiful, relaxed great hall comfortably seating 50 or so music lovers. The food is good too.
Butler, the jazz and blues pianist, composer, and singer from New Orleans, gave an energetic and uplifting performance. Influenced by Sir Roland Hanna, James Booker and Professor Longhair (Henry Roeland Byrd), his music is infused with the rhythms of New Orleans piano— a style rarely mentioned in blogs and articles—and the blues. His speech and manner are gentle and humorous. His playing is forceful.
He opened the historically informed program with “Trocha,” a tango from 1896 by William Henderson Tyres. Essentially playing the piece straight, he let the Cuban dance rhythms dominate the hall. You could hear and feel the relationships between Caribbean, New Orleans, jazz and blues music. Butler permeated the evening with the kind of rhythms New Orleans second-liners dance to as he built on the mood set by the opening number. He followed with tour de force versions of “Wolverine Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton (1906), “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (“Funky Butt”) by Willy Cornish (1902) and Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” (1923). But even when he moved on to “How to Handle a Woman” by Lerner and Loewe, “Fiddler on the Roof” by Bock and Harnick, “If I Only Had a Heart” and “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” by Arlen and Harburg, the heavily syncopated and dotted-rhythm style of New Orleans piano dominated. Everything was infused with the blues.
In the second half of the program he introduced powerful vocals into the evening and played his own “New Orleanian in Exile,” “Booker Time,” and “I Got My Eyes on You” as well as “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” by Cropper and Redding. For encores he sang a soulful version of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River,” the best I have ever heard live, and got the room dancing to Professor Longhair’s “Go to the Mardi Gras.”
Reviewers often mention Butler’s “thunderous” approach to the keyboard, use of syncopated block chords and clusters, fast interacting arpeggiated lines, the interaction between hands and the strong rhythms. But, for me, there is more than a heavy touch. I can hear his love for classical music. You can tell he listened to Alicia de Larrocha, Andre Watts, Andre Previn, Walter Gieseking, Horowitz, as well as jazz greats Peterson, Tatum, Jarett and Corea—and loves them all. He produces an original, rich, deep gumbo that brings me back to New Orleans, inviting me to move with the music and participate in the event.
Butler gives yearly trio and solo performances at Cherokee Ranch. Check out their varied schedule.

Thanks to Dr. Gannuch for sharing his impressions. As far as I know, there is no video of Butler’s Cherokee Ranch concert. Here he is during his stint last year as artist in residence at Mendocino College in northern California. Listen to him turn a lemon into lemonade at about 2:45.

Butler’s CD called Pianola is a collection of his astonishing solo performances.

During my early development as a listener, I was immersed in the works of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Miles Davis when along came Johnny Wittwer. Wittwer was a Seattle pianist who had been been important in the traditional jazz revival on the west coast in the 1940s. Early in that decade he had a trio with clarinetist Joe Darensbourg and drummer Keith Purvis. Later, he was active in San Francisco and worked with Kid Ory and Wingy Manone, among others. In the dialectic of the absurd but deadly serious 1950s division between boppers and moldy figs, most boppers regarded him as hopelessly moldy. Too bad for them. Wittwer was a superb pianist who knew everything there was to know about Jelly Roll Morton. He could explain and demonstrate Jelly to a faretheewell. Although he chose not to play it, he also knew what modern jazz was made of. As an exercise in whimsy or irony, he would toss off a few bars of an uncannily accurate Horace Silver impression.
For a whippersnapper, hanging out with John was not only a fine education but also great fun. He was as hip to English literature as he was to Jelly Roll. Discussions with Wittwer helped me with my class on the Victorian novel. All of that came to mind when I stumbled across this Wittwer solo recording from 1945. It’s good to hear him again.

Wittwer once suggested that he and I write a Broadway musical together. He would do the music, I the words. It would star Pat Suzuki, whom we both knew. I went in the Marine Corps and the collaboration never happened. Pat went on to star in The Flower Drum Song.