Archives for October 2012

Halloween is nearly over here in the western US, but the trick-or-treaters are still ringing doorbells in Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the Philippines and, for all I know, Tokyo and Beijing. We plied 115 ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, cowboys, ballerinas, spidermen and fairy princesses with candy—a new record. I’m told that this is the best jack o’lantern I’ve ever carved. But, she says that every year. Happy Halloween.

Alto saxophonist Jeff Chang responded to yesterday’s Clifford Brown item with this message:

I don’t know if you’ve heard this guy Dominick Farinacci. He is quite a trumpet player, and you may find this clip fun to watch.

Oh, I’ve heard of Farinacci. The clip of him flawlessly spinning out a Clifford solo is, indeed, fun to watch—unless you’re a trumpeter who has struggled trying to play it. This is the preamble to the video, which was posted on YouTube today.

Amidst an 18 city tour with vibraphonist Christian Tamburr, Dominick performs Clifford Brown’s classic solo from “Jordu” on the tour bus traveling to Hilton Head, SC. Clifford’s birthday was yesterday, Oct. 30th, and was one of the greatest trumpet players of all time.

If Farinacci hadn’t done that so well, I would not follow it with the original by Brown-Roach, Inc. The personnel are listed on the album cover.

For three Rifftides archive posts about Dominick Farinacci, go here.

Today is the 82nd anniversary of Clifford Brown’s birth. Here is what I wrote in Rifftides on June 26, 2006, half a century following his death.

Fifty years ago today at The Seattle Times, as I ripped copy from the wire machines my eye went to a story in the latest Associated Press national split. A young trumpeter named Clifford Brown had been killed early that morning in a car crash. My heart stopped for a beat or two. My stomach churned. I felt ill. I was attempting to master the trumpet and, like virtually all aspiring trumpet players, idolized Brown. The life of a majestically inventive musician had ended violently on a rainy highway in Pennsylvania. He was four months short of his twenty-sixth birthday. When I think about his loss, I still feel ill.

There has never been a jazz musician who worked harder, lived cleaner, and accomplished or promised more in so short a lifetime. His practice routine encompassed taping himself as he worked out on trumpet and piano. I have listened to some of those tapes. It is moving to hear Brown pursue–and achieve–perfection as he brings complex ideas to fruition through the persistent application of his technical mastery, to hear him sing a phrase and then play it repeatedly until he has polished it nearly to his satisfaction. Like most first-rank artists, he was never truly satisfied with his performance. To listeners, however, Brown’s solos are among the glories of twentieth century music. To trumpet players, his work remains an inspiration. His passion, power, lyricism and flaweless execution constitute a model whose pursuit is bound to bring improvement.

In Today’s Washington Post, Matt Schudel summarizes Brown’s life and contributions. For a fuller account, read Nick Catalano’s biography of Brown. Fortunately, Brown recorded copiously during his few years of playing. Most of his work remains in print. This album captures him at his peak with the group he and drummer Max Roach co-led. This box set covers highlights from his recordings for several labels. If you don’t know Clifford Brown’s work, I suggest that you move immediately toward the nearest CD shop or website.

The television comic Soupy Sales loved jazz, knew its history and many of its leading players. Early in his career, when he had a local show in Detroit, he frequently presented jazz stars as guests. After Sales died on October 22 at the age of 83, many obituaries mentioned that the only known video of Clifford Brown performing is from a kinescope recording of the Sales show. For decades, it was assumed lost, but Sales found the film in his garage in the mid-1990s. Here is the trumpeter in February, 1956, five months before that fatal auto crash, playing “Lady Be Good” and “Memories of You.”

Study in Brown, mentioned by Clifford in the interview, is one of the important albums by the quintet he led with drummer Max Roach. The Dinah Washington jam session with Brown, Roach, Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry and Herb Geller–among others–is another basic repertoire item for serious jazz listeners.

MULLIGAN AND “YARDBIRD SUITE”
Part 2
By Jeff Sultanof

When Jazz Lines began operation, Rob DuBoff had a meeting with Franca Mulligan and made an agreement. I contacted him about what Mulligan had said to me, and became his editor. Obviously the CJB library was a priority, but Jazz Lines also issued new editions I prepared of Mulligan’s contributions to the Miles Davis Nonet, which originally appeared in book form from Hal Leonard as scores only. (Photo by Hank O’Neal)

In 1995, Gerry told me he wanted to include “Rocker” (“Rock Salt”) in the play-along, and I asked him which version he wanted to use as a basis for the new lead sheet. He had a lead sheet already written, but made changes to it. He did not have the nonet version (Miles had that in storage, as I later found out), and he did not have his version for Charlie Parker with Strings (which was also in private hands and later donated to the Institute of Jazz Studies). Quite casually, I asked him about his arrangements for Parker and he said, “You know, I wrote something else for Bird, but didn’t finish it. I was going to California.”

When the Bird with Strings book of original scores and parts was acquired by IJS, it quickly became a collection examined by hundreds of scholars and fans. Rob published many titles recorded and unrecorded, which included a Mulligan composition named “Gold Rush” which was recorded privately. Of course I was thrilled to work on it, and figured that this was the mystery arrangement Mulligan had spoken about.

I was wrong!

Some months ago, Rob and I met with Franca to get more Mulligan music for eventual publication, including his Octet for Sea Cliff, and some CJB material. Rob was flipping through the master list of Mulligan’s collection and found the title “Yardbird Suite.” Surprised to see this listing, he located it in a folder with a photocopy of a sketch score inside. It was indeed “Yardbird Suite,” the arranger was listed as ‘Jeru’ (Mulligan’s nickname) and had the following note at the top right hand corner: “Bird, you’ll hafta (sic) do something with the last chorus – I couldn’t finish it.” Mystery solved!

Rob made a copy and sent it to me to evaluate. Could this be published? I figured that I would start working on it and see where the music took me.

Mulligan sketched this arrangement as two staves for two trumpets and a trombone, one stave for English Horn, two staves for five saxophones (including Parker), a stave with chord names, two staves for strings, and one for bass. He certainly would have written this out with each instrument on its own stave as a finished score that would be copied and played, but he had not gotten to that point and never would. He went to California during the Spring of 1952, so dating the music was not an issue.

Bird was touring with an ensemble of oboe/English Horn, strings and rhythm during this period, an instrumentation different in “Yardbird Suite.” Why the saxes and brass? I believe that this was written for a proposed recording date with a small ensemble and strings. The names Walter and Roy appear at one point on the score, indicating drummer Roy Haynes and pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who were playing with Parker at the time. Solos in addition to Parker are for baritone sax (Mulligan) and trombone (at a guess, Kai Winding, but maybe J.J. Johnson or Bill Harris). Perhaps Bird wanted to make an album that was commercial (hence the strings) but would also be more jazz oriented; it is tempting to think of what such an album would have sounded like.

The second question: could this setting be finished? As it turned out, Mulligan sketched out only half of the last chorus. I examined every page of the sketch, and soon noticed that Gerry wrote two different versions of the last eight bars of the first chorus, and one of them could certainly be used to complete the arrangement. Except for filling in string harmonies in two spots (the chord changes were indicated, so this was simple based on how he wrote the rest of the arrangement), a final chord to end the piece, and a few other details, this is 97% Mulligan. It is now published and for sale.

“Gold Rush” showed how far Mulligan had come in writing string parts vs. his first experience with “Rocker.” “Yardbird Suite” takes this a bit further. Mulligan told me that by 1948 or so, he was thinking more horizontally than vertically when writing ensemble music, and he was no longer boxed in by standard chord structures, part of the legacy of his discussions with Gil Evans. There are subtle dissonances in “Yardbird” that fly by which lend a bit of spice to a beautiful swinging setting.

Mulligan had a real flair for string writing, and it is a pity he had few opportunities to feature strings in his music until much later, when he composed such symphonic orchestra pieces as “Entente for Baritone Saxophone and Symphony Orchestra” and “Momo’s Clock.” How wonderful it is to have a bit more of his writing for strings, just as it was incredible to discover that George Russell had written a Bird with Strings version of “Ezzthetic” that Bird didn’t play.

Obviously I consider this version of “Yardbird Suite” a very important find, and am very humbled by the opportunity to help bring it to light.

©2012, Jeff Sultanof

Rifftides is grateful to Mr. Sultanof for the opportunity to publish his story. We look forward to someone recording this Mulligan-Parker collaboration that never was. For more information about the score, and to hear a computerized indication of how it might sound by an orchestra, go here. If you’re a musician, you may be tempted to play along in the sections meant for Charlie Parker’s solos.

Here’s Mulligan’s composition “Rocker” (aka “Rock Salt’) for Charlie Parker with strings, recorded in concert in New York in 1950.

If all had gone as planned, in a few hours I would be on an airplane headed east. A bunch of us who wrestled our commissions from the United States Marine Corps a few years ago were going to have a reunion at Quantico, Virginia, the scene of the struggle. Hurricane Sandy put an end to that. Along with countless other events, she wiped out the reunion and is making life inconvenient— to say the least—for 50 million people in and near her path. If you and your loved ones are among them and there is any chance that you’re in danger, please take the advice of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, one of the dozen states in peril from the storm: “Don’t be stupid. Get out.”

Old Pal Mike Yates mentioned in an e-mail note that he’s going to see his old pal George Amabile for the first time in 40 years. J. Michael Yates (pictured left) is one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets, radio dramatists and prison memoirists. We met in New Orleans in the 1960s and have stayed in touch. The story is too long to go into here, but without Mike my novel Poodie James (right column, scroll down) would still be in a digital desk drawer.

The Winnipeg Review says that Amabile (pictured right) is, “the éminence gris of Manitoba poetry and indeed is an eminent figure in North American poetry.” When Amabile shows up in Vancouver next month to collect the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize in two categories, poetry and short fiction, he and Yates will get together. That’s bound to be a momentous reunion.

But, wait. There’s more about Amabile

Curious, I did a search and found that Amabile, a transplanted American, has a deep connection to jazz. Victor Enns, yet another Canadian poet, interviewed Amabile for the Winnipeg Review and asked him how much jazz had influenced his writing. Amabile’s answer contains a lovely assessment of the unexplainable magic and evanescent nature of spontaneous creativity in jazz and other art forms.

I’ve never been able to discover or invent a methodology for accurately measuring the influence of anything, including other poems and poets, on my writing, or anyone’s writing. What I can say is that I began listening to jazz while I was still attending Princeton High School. Even after I left for college, gangs of us would go up to New York during the summer or spring break, and hit the clubs, the Five Spot, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Metronome, and half a dozen dives where jazz players would come in very late, after their paid gigs, to drink and jam.

This was in the fifties, Kai and Jay, Parker, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Cozy Cole, Mingus, Rollins, the MJQ, Brubeck and Stan Getz, Gillespie, Adderley and one night in some dive or other, we saw Thelonious Monk sit down and hammer out his Quadratics. We got very pumped about this. Then in comes Coltrane and sits in. It went on and on, like they had tapped into some inexhaustible resource deep in the earth or the sea or the night sky – breathtaking, and one of the things it taught me was the way maybe the best of jazz or poetry, or anything else, precipitates like that, so perfectly, out of the flux, out of unpredictable energies that come together and vibrate with such colour and clarity it seems their intensities are accessible anywhere, anytime, and just as you think that, the music fades, as if whatever brought such magic together also burned it away.

To read all of the Enns interview with George Amabile, go here.

To get at least a glimmer of what he may have heard from Monk and Coltrane that night, let’s listen. This is “Nutty” from their 1957 Carnegie Hall concert with Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass, and Shadow Wilson, drums.

Here’s a poem from J. Michael Yates’s 1969 collection, Hunt In An Unmapped Interior. It reflects the spirit of what Amabile told Enns, and of what Monk and Coltrane did together. I reproduce it with Mr. Yates’s permission.

Poem
It must speak of things
Which go quickly
Through shadows of consciousness

Like small animals in the thicket
You cannot quite
Be sure you’ve seen.

©J. Michael Yates

The Rifftides staff is making its way through a few of the CDs that have accumulated while we paid attention to some of the other matters alluded to in the subtitle of this enterprise. You will find a previous installment two posts below, where October 23, 2012, will live forever in the archive, or as long as there’s an archive. At this juncture it is unclear when you will find the next in this series, but please keep coming back; there’s almost always something or other.

Tommy Cecil and Bill Mays, Side By Side: Sondheim Duos (CD Baby)

Stephen Sondheim’s theater songs are replete with terrific melodies. They are also loaded with harmonic surprises that lend themselves to improvisation—if the players have the intellect and chops to take advantage of them. Bassist Cecil and pianist Mays know how to capitalize on unusual turns in chord structures. Their keen ears and quick thinking serve them well in this chamber music encounter. Sondheim’s melody lines and chord changes in pieces like “Broadway Baby” and “Comedy Tonight” inspire Mays to now and then summon up Thelonious Monk; great fun, but it is Mays’ originality that wins the day. Cecil solos with imagination and a fat bass sound that is comfortable and consistent from the bottom of his range to the top. Highlights: Cecil’s stewardship of the enchanting melody of “Not While I’m Around,” Mays’ expressiveness in his solo on “Every Day a Little Death,” their refractive interaction on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.”

Terell Stafford, This Side of Strayhorn (MaxJazz)

The “side” of the title is the extensive cache of Billy Strayhorn compositions that did not achieve the prominence of “Take the ‘A’ Train” or “Lush Life.” Happily, the latter is included in the trumpeter and flugelhornist’s superb quintet album, but many listeners may not be acquainted with the Strayhorn gems “Multicolored Blue,” “U.M.M.G,” “Smada” and “Lana Turner.” Stafford’s playing in those pieces and others by Duke Ellington’s protégé and writing partner will be a stimulating introduction. On “Lana Turner,” without imitating Louis Armstrong he conjures up Amstrong’s spirit. Although in his solos there are also traces of trumpeters from Cootie Williams to Harry Edison to Freddie Hubbard, Stafford confirms that at 45 he is an independent voice, one of the most important trumpeters of his generation. Tim Warfield is on soprano and tenor saxophones in the front line with Stafford. They have fine support from pianist Bruce Barth, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Dana Hall.

Brad Mehldau, Highway Rider (Nonesuch).

I have been trying to catch up with Brad Mehldau recordings. Maybe someday I will. This one has been out for a couple of years. It has the pianist with saxophonist Joshua Redman, drummers Jeff Ballard and Matt Chamberlain, bassist Larry Grenadier, and on several tracks an orchestra of strings and woodwinds. The playing is splendid throughout. The orchestral pieces have moments of disturbing beauty.

Anne Sofie Von Otter, Brad Mehldau, Love Songs (Naïve)

The first disc contains a song cycle for which Mehldau wrote music to poems by Sara Teasdale, Philip Larkin, e.e. cummings and other poets. He accompanies Von Otter, a glorious Swedish mezzo-soprano. The second disc allows Mehldau to project his personality, which is a match for Von Otter’s, in songs by a range of writers. Among them are Léo Ferré, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, Joni Mitchell and John Lennon.

Anne Sofie Von Otter, Speak Low: Songs By Kurt Weill (Deutsche Grammophon)

With an orchestra conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and piano accompaniment by Bengt Forsberg on some pieces, Von Otter sings nine songs from Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins and others from Lady in the Dark, Happy End and One Touch of Venus. She runs the gamut from formidable in “Zorn” (“Anger”) to pleadingly seductive in “Speak Low.” This is how you would hear Weill in the theater—if you were lucky.

Rifftides readers in the UK or planning to be there next month, or those with internet capability, may be interested in this communiqué from John Gill, partner of the late composer, arranger and bandleader Graham Collier.

The London Jazz Festival in conjunction with the BBC Radio Big Band has confirmed the memorial concert for Graham at the BBC Maida Vale Studios in London on Wednesday 14 November at 8pm.

The concert will feature the British premiere of Graham’s penultimate work, The Blue Suite, as well as a selection of his and the musicians’ personal favourites from the Collier canon. The BBC Radio Big Band will be conducted by flautist-saxophonist Geoff Warren, a key Collier player for more than thirty years, and will also feature Collier stalwarts such as Roger Dean, John Marshall, Ed Speight, Art Themen and Steve Waterman, as well as former Collier collaborators including Roy Babbington, Graeme Blevins and Andy Grappy, and guest Jonathan Williams (French horn). The BBC band will also feature trumpeters Martin Shaw and Mike Lovatt, trombonist Gordon Campbell and saxophonists Jay Craig and Andy Panayi.

Tickets are free and are available from the BBC ticket unit here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/shows/jazz_line_up_nov12

while directions for the BBC Maida Vale Studios can be found here:

http://www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk/venues

The concert will be recorded for BBC broadcast at 11pm GMT on 25 November, and will be broadcast live on the internet at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/, where it will also be available for seven days on the BBC iPlayer net broadcast system.

I hope that one way or another you can hear the concert.

For a Rifftides piece on Collier’s passing in 2011, click here. The post contains a 15-minute video of Collier rehearsing a band and talking about his work.

Stacks and boxes of CD review copies surround me, an indication that the music is alive and well or—at any rate—an indication that lots of jazz artists are recording. That’s good. The bad news is that unless someone discovers a way of listening that is other than sequential, it is impossible to hear and evaluate more than a smattering of those albums.

Let’s attempt to catch up with a few recent releases. I thought of adopting the Twitter maximum of 140 characters, but that’s probably carrying brevity too far. Some recordings may deserve as many as 200 characters.

Clare Fischer Orchestra: Extension (International Phonograph, Inc.)

Until recently, the only reissue of this vital 1963 album was an inadequately remastered vinyl disc released in 1984. Following Fischer’s death early this year, Johnathan Horwich’s International Phonograph company has restored the music to the luminous sound of the Pacific Jazz original, even improved on it. Fischer specialized in tonal shadings and harmonic subtleties, but also in rhythmic vitality. He melded those qualities in pieces like “Ornithardy,” “Extension” and “Canto Africano.” In “Quiet Dawn” he created a masterpiece of reflective impressionism. The improvising soloists are Fischer, brilliant on piano and organ, and tenor saxophonist Jerry Coker.

The classy CD package is a miniature of the original double-gatefold LP sleeve, with the extensive liner notes reproduced in readable type size on a removable sheet tucked into the CD pocket. The music is a reminder that with this album, at age 35 Fischer confirmed his place in the ranks of major jazz arrangers and composers. This is a most welcome release.

Tia Fuller: Angelic Warrior (Mack Avenue)

Fuller’s alto saxophone solo on “Body Soul” and her obbligato in the piece behind guest singer Dianne Reeves typify her growth as an improviser. Her band with pianist sister Shamie Royston, drummer brother-in-law Rudy Royston and lifelong friend Mimi Jones on bass provides the setting for Fuller’s increasingly forthright soloing on alto and soprano——and an outlet for her imaginative writing. Appearances by bassist John Patitucci and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington add sonic and rhythmic interest to the album. The two duet with delight and density on Fuller’s arrangement combining Cole Porter’s “So in Love” and “All of You.” Elsewhere, Patitucci plays electric piccolo bass, soloing on it like a guitarist. Despite the presence of heavyweight guests, the imagination and aggressiveness of Fuller’s playing dominate the CD. She, Rudy Royston and Carrington are formidable in an alto-percussion conversation on “Cherokee.”

Joe La Barbera: Silver Streams (Jazz Compass)

Long after the east-vs-west nonsense of the 1950s and ‘60s, much of the jazz establishment still looks the other way, listens the other way, when it comes to music played and recorded on the left coast. Such close-minded listeners—they don’t include you, of course—would be well advised to make an exception for this album by a powerful and subtle drummer. It is yet another sleeper by La Barbera, who with trumpeter Clay Jenkins, bassist Tom Warrington and guitarist Larry Koonse founded the Jazz Compass label a few years ago. Jenkins, Warrington, saxophonist Bob Sheppard and pianist Bill Cunliffe join La Barbera in a collection that contains a stunning version of Scott LaFaro’s “Jade Visions.” In it, the leader displays the lacy cymbal work that has been one of the joys of his music from his days with Bill Evans. Cunliffe’s title tune, structured like a suite, opens for mutual improvisation as well as solos by all hands. Further highlights: the quintet’s takes on Steve Swallow’s quirky “Bite Your Grandmother” and Elvin Jones’s “E.J.’s Blues.”

Carol Vasquez: I Have Dreamed (Carol Vasquez Music)

Vasquez’s classical training and musical theater background are apparent in her phrasing, diction and clarity of intonation. She imparts cabaret intimacy to “Safe and Warm,” with its insinuating guitar accompaniment by Charlie Hunter, and to Bill Evans’s harmonically challenging “Remembering the Rain.” She swings nicely in “The Song is You,” expresses the heartbreak of “Blame it on My Youth” and captures the longing of Curtis Lewis’s “All Night Long.” The canny arrangements and piano accompaniment are by Jan Stevens, who in his internet life is the proprietor of The Bill Evans Webpages. The repertoire is eleven standard songs of generations from Cole Porter to Stevie Wonder plus “On My Way to Love” by Stevens and Vasquez, which has standard potential.

Duke Ellington’s My People:The Complete Show (Storyville)
Duke Ellington: The Treasury Shows, Vol. 16 (Storyville)

Ellington’s music is replete with African-American themes, but he made only one overtly angry statement about racial injustice, a powerful one. He composed “King Fit the Battle of Alabam” as a centerpiece of My People, the tribute to black Americans that he wrote, produced and directed in Chicago in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement. Taped during the run of the show but never released in its entirety until now, the original cast recording features singers Jimmy Grissom, Joya Sherill and Lil Greenwood, a chorus, and an orchestra led by Jimmy Jones that includes members of Ellington’s band. Ray Nance, Bill Berry, Booty Wood, Bob Freedman, Harold Ashby, Louie Bellson and Russell Procope are among the soloists. “Come Sunday” and variations on it run through the production, there are strains of the blues and allusions to Black, Brown and Beige. But at the end, what lingers is the rage when the chorus sings “Martin—Luther—King—fit the battle of—bam—bam—bam!” and the band follows in a round of solos saturated with the energy of positive indignation.

Simultaneous with My People, Storyville released the most recent of the apparently endless series of Ellington’s 1945-46 radio broadcasts for the Treasury Department, inspiring Americans to buy war bonds, then victory bonds. The series amounts to an audio album capturing the Ellington band still populated by some of its biggest stars, including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown, Tricky Sam Nanton and Cat Anderson. The two-CD set has a few rarities; an early version of the Carney baritone sax feature “Frustration,” Carney’s composition “Jennie,” the incandescent vocalist Kay Davis singing “Dancing in the Dark,” the premier of Hodges’ “Crosstown,” Billy Strayhorn on piano backing Hodges in Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower.” In several solos, Al Sears acquits himself well in one of the toughest assignments in jazz, as Ben Webster’s successor on tenor saxophone. The set has a few bonus flashbacks to broadcasts of the 1943 edition of the band, when Webster, Shorty Baker and Taft Jordan were still aboard.

Just for fun, let’s go out with a bonus of our own. Here’s a piece from a later Ellington Treasury broadcast. He was still doing his patriotic duty in 1951. The introduction is by Willis Conover.

I have no intention of posting about every jazz person’s birthday. There are other sites on the web for that. I have every intention of acknowledging Dizzy Gillespie’s 95th, which is today.

The video below finds him sitting in with Johnny Griffin’s quartet at Châteauvallon, France, in August of 1971. Gillespie was 53 and at a peak of one of the great playing periods of his life. Vince Benedetti is the pianist, Alby Cullaz the bassist, Arthur Taylor the drummer. The same band appears on the Griffin DVD that is a current Rifftides recommendation (see the right-hand column). This piece, “I’ll Remember April,” is not included in the DVD.

You may think it’s about time the Rifftides staff gave you new recommendations. So do I. Therefore, merciless taskmaster that I am, the staff has complied by finding three CDs that are quite different from one another, a DVD that has one grand jazz master sitting in with another, and a readable book that can go a long way toward telling you everything you wanted to know about the jazz repertoire. You will find the recommendations in the right column under Doug’s Picks and, temporarily, also on the main page. Happy listening, viewing and reading.