I just came across this video clip of George Shearing answering fellow pianist Billy Taylor’s questions about how he developed the Shearing style. The clip has no date, but Taylor’s leisure suit says the 1970s. The interested onlooker is Marian McPartland.

On his Jazz Profiles website, Steve Cerra begins a tribute to Bill Holman with this passage:

In Japan, a select few of those who maintain the country’s artistic traditions or make a unique contribution to them are accorded the respect of the nation by being designated as a Living National Treasure [a considerable amount of schimolies also come with the title each year].
When it comes to composing and arranging for Jazz big bands, no one is more deserving of such consideration than Willis “Bill” Holman.
However, because this country does not have such an award, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has decided to step up on behalf of grateful Jazz fans everywhere and to bestow upon Bill the distinction of being a Living International Treasure.

The Jazz Profiles post includes a brilliant piece of perception about Holman by André Previn and an embarrassingly large selection of prose from notes I’ve written for Holman albums. To read the tribute and see Steve’s photo montage accompanying one of Holman’s recordings, go here.
For even more on Holman, see this Rifftides archive post.

The young bassist, composer and vocalist Esperanza Spalding last night shattered decades of pop and rock dominance of the Grammys to become the first jazz musician ever to be named best new artist. She edged out the teen idol Justin Bieber and three other pop performers. Spalding’s Chamber Music Society CD broke through several categories in 2010 and became a best seller for her label, Telarc. For a Rifftides review of the album, go here. Spalding made an impression in the jazz community for music with her own groups and with Joe Lovano’s band Us Five.
Less than three months after his death, James Moody’s 4B won in the best jazz instrumental category. Other jazz winners are Dee Dee Bridgewater for Eleanora Fagan, her tribute to Billie Holiday; Herbie Hancock for best improvised jazz solo; the Mingus Big Band and—in the overall Grammy category of best instrumental composition—Billy Childs for “The Path Among the Trees” from his album Autumn In Moving Pictures: Chamber Music Vol. 2.
For a complete list of the winners in all 109 Grammy categories, go here.

James Moody toured in most parts of the world and made friends wherever he went. Following his death in December, the Norwegian pianist Per Husby sent the story of his encounter with Moody a couple of decades ago and the touching question Moody asked him the day after their concert. The pictures and captions below will mean more if you first read Mr. Husby’s story. It contains a link to a vocal performance by Moody that includes yodeling. Click here. Then come back to this page.
Here is Per Husby’s photographic update of that story.

The color shot is taken at Frognerseteren restaurant outside of Oslo in 1994 – just after we had finished the lunch where Moody had asked me the “do I sound old?” question.

The black and white photo was taken at the jazz festival in Molde in 1979 on the gig that produced the yodel track I posted on the net.

Here, with her permission, is Linda Moody’s note to Mr. Husby.

My sons and I have thoroughly enjoyed the clip of Moody. When we were first married Moody yodeled all the time and I had forgotten how good he was at that. Thank you so much. I think your letter has gone all over the Internet. 3 different people have sent it to me. By the way I am not half Norwegian. My Mother was born in Stavanger and my Father was born near Trondheim. We had a huge family reunion in Sandness in 1988.

Unlike many areas of the northern hemisphere, the Pacific Northwest has had a mild winter so far. Still, it has hardly been prime cycling weather. It was unseasonably warm today—above 60º C—so my Italian friend Vigorelli Bianchi and I hit the road. Downside: the roads and streets were scattered with gravel laid for non-skid protection when there was ice and snow. That made cornering hazardous in spots. Downside #2: there was a powerful southwest wind. On the outbound journey some of the headwind gusts had us going so slow that gravity nearly overcame forward motion. Vigorelli never complained, but my legs did.
Upside: on the homebound leg going northeast, we flew like—well—the wind. We were passing cars. It was exhilarating to be back in the saddle again.

From San Francisco comes word that trumpeter Allen Smith died last week at the age of 85. Smith’s musical career got underway at the same time as those of his San Francisco State College classmates Paul Desmond, Cal Tjader, Jerome Richardson, Vernon Alley, Roberta Mandel and Dick Vartaniah. He worked with them in various bands and with other Bay Area jazz mainstays, including guitarist Eddie Duran. Although Smith’s work as a musician never stopped, he fit it around his schedule as an educator who earned a masters degree and became a school principal. Smith played trumpet with Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Gil Evans and recorded with Ellington, Evans, Tjader, Flip Phillips and Hubert Laws among others. He was in the trumpet section on Evans’ classic Great Jazz Standards album, which is included in this collection of Evans’ Pacific Jazz recordings. He made his first album as a leader in 1998, when he was 72. From The San Francisco Chronicle:

Mr. Smith was a mainstay at the fabled Fillmore after-hours club, Jimbo’s Bop City. Along with venerable jazz bassist Vernon Alley, drummer Earl Watkins and others, Mr. Smith helped end segregation in San Francisco nightclubs in the late ’40s. He was one of the primary players at the short-lived Blanco’s Cotton Club on O’Farrell Street, the city’s first desegregated club in the elegant 1907 theater now called the Great American Music Hall.
“Opening a club with all-black entertaining and help, where anybody could come? That was quite radical at the time,” Mr. Smith recalled in 1998.

To read the entire obituary, go here.

At a jam session a couple of nights ago, someone called “Dear Old Stockholm.” I suggested that we play it in the unaltered form of the Swedish folk song that Stan Getz recorded in Stockholm 60 years ago.
The bass player said, “Huh?”
“It was a folk song?” said the pianist.
Many musicians and listeners are under the impression that Miles Davis wrote the song. There is also a general belief that it came equipped with the four bars that Davis inserted. The critic Bob Blumenthal has called that section “static chordal motion.” The modification may have been at Gil Evans’ suggestion when Davis recorded the piece for Blue Note in 1954. Think of the shimmering hanging chords in so many Evans orchestrations. Davis’ 1956 Columbia quintet version with John Coltrane also uses the annexed section.
I argued at the session that although the static motion (I love the self-contradiction in that term) makes for greater sophistication, it sullies the simplicity and purity that attracted Getz to the tune in the first place. So, we mentally erased the four static-motion bars in the fake book lead sheet and returned the song to its original state. I’m not sure that all of the jammers went away convinced they’ll play it that way from now on, but we had a good time with it.
Whoever put together the fake book gives writing credit to “Varmeland.” I suppose it is possible that there is a Swedish composer named Varmeland, but if there is he didn’t write “Dear Old Stockholm.” The AABA melody, with its distinctive four-bar bridge, is a beloved traditional song that goes back at least as far as the early 1800s. Its name is “Ack Värmeland, Du Sköna.” Värmeland, sometimes spelled Värmland, is a province in southwest Sweden on the border with Norway. It is noted for its beauty (see the picture). Here are three versions of the song, first in its unadulterated form by the imposing singer and actress Zarah Leander (1907-1981) in a 1965 television program.

Stan Getz recorded the song for the Swedish label Metronome during his 1951 tour of Scandinavia. His rhythm section was pianist Bengt Hallberg, who created an exquisite solo; bassist Gunnar Johnson; and drummer Jack Noren. When Roost issued the record in the US, Getz renamed it “Dear Old Stockholm.” That recording is hard to find, but the track is available as an MP3 download. Getz’s treatment of the melody helped earn him the nickname “The Sound.” Getz is followed by Monica Zetterlund (1937-2005), with the brilliant accompanist Jimmy Jones on piano.

For one more interpretation among the many on record, here is the great Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling (1911-1960) in a video illustrated with scenes of Värmeland.

On the off chance that you don’t understand Swedish, here is a translation into English.





Glad att lyssna på dig (Happy listening to you)

Teachout found video of one of the most unlikely—and most delightful—performer pairings imaginable. To see it, go to Terry’s blog, About Last Night.
Then hurry back.

We in the Rifftides Department Of Language Reform realize that it has been only a year since this item ran. But it failed to change peoples’ lousy usage habits, so here it is again. This time, please pay attention.

The Rifftides Department Of Language Reform (DOLR) has been neglecting its duties. Its members claim that their failure to stop the misuse of “absolutely” and “no problem” discouraged them. At a staff meeting on the subject, the DOLRers moaned that they despair of succeeding where Fowler, Strunk, White, Bernstein, Ciardi and other titans of proper English usage have failed. They pointed out that people still say, “ya know” every few seconds; still say and write, “they” when they should use, “he” or “she;” millions still bloat their sentences with “on a daily basis” and “on a national basis,” wasting words when they could streamline with, “daily” and “nationally.”
“Never give up,” I told them. “It’s God’s—or Webster’s—work.”
“Maybe we’re being too fussy, too pedantic,” they said. “Maybe the language is just taking its evolutionary course, and what sounds wrong today will be right tomorrow.”
“Shut up and watch this,” I explained.

To learn more about the poet Taylor Mali, go here. Thanks to Bobby Shew for calling this delightful wig bubble to our attention.

Language is the dress of thought.—Samuel Johnson

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.—George Orwell

Language is the light of the mind.—John Stuart Mill

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.—Elizabeth Bowen

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.—Lewis Thomas

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.—Tom Lehrer

Russell Malone, Triple Play (MaxJazz). The warmth, conversational phrasing and lack of hurry in Malone’s guitar work find space and congeniality in the spare background of David Wong’s bass and Montez Coleman’s drums. In the absence of another chording instrument to collaborate or contend with, Malone is free to make harmonic choices without concern for clash or collision. As the guitarist observes in his liner comments, Wong abets him with “great notes”…”good time” and taste. Coleman’s snare drum accents and cymbal splashes color the proceedings without calling undue attention to themselves or disrupting the flow.
Malone’s repertoire here is an assortment of his compositions, jazz tunes by others and standards. With its boogaloo inflections, his spunky “Sweet Georgia Peach” seems to allude to the pop funk of the 1970s. Like many of Malone’s originals, “Pecan Pie” and “Pocketwatch” have overtones of nostalgia and reflection. He radiates joy in “Butch and Butch,” a blues from Oliver Nelson’s 1961 The Blues and the Abstract Truth. He revives “Tailfeathers” from Patrão, Ron Carter’ 1980 album featuring Chet Baker and Kenny Barron. He lets Cole Porter’s melody tell its own story as he caresses the 1939 ballad “Do I Love You?” then ends with a series of astringent ascending figures that falls away into the reassurance of a major chord. It is a typical Malone study in contrast.

More Recent Listening reviews to come.

It is known in jazz circles, particularly in New York City, that the trumpeter, composer, bandleader and teacher John McNeil maintains his career through the onslaught of a disease that has the potential to disable him. A lengthy profile of McNeil by journalist, educator and pianist Ben Waltzer gives insight into the disorder McNeil inherited and how he battles and accommodates its depredations. The piece, “John McNeil’s Backbone,” is on Waltzer’s blog, A Hundred Tacks. Here is an excerpt.

Typically droll and self-deprecating, McNeil reaches for humor, often of the dark sort, whenever possible. (Recovering in the hospital recently from a staph infection that only a single type of antibiotic 
could kill, he said, “It’s showing signs of becoming totally drug resistant, at which point it’ll be like the 19th century, like, ‘Bye.'”) But beneath his conviviality lurk strains of disharmony.
McNeil is struggling. He always has.
Rediscovery, his latest recording, doesn’t show it. New York Times critic Ben Ratliff called his recent playing “astonishing in its harmonic acuity.” This wasn’t always the case, and not for lack of 
talent or skill. McNeil has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a painful genetic disorder of the peripheral nerves that affects muscle control.
As if concocted to beset trumpet players, the degenerative condition has, among other complications, attacked his diaphragm, integral to blowing air through the horn; his facial muscles, which help produce 
tone and timbre; his tongue, which controls articulation; and his fingers, needed to work the trumpet’s valves. The recurrence of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease—it comes in waves—has forced McNeil
 to quit playing altogether several times since he came on the jazz scene in the mid-1970s. At times, he’s had to use a laundry rack to support his trumpet while practicing. He had a dental bridge built to 
refocus his embouchure. He learned to play with his left hand, to give him an alternative when his right hand won’t cooperate. And in an art that prizes timing, the degeneration of his reflexes has demanded 
he play slightly early so the notes arrive on time.
Now, his performing career is on the upswing again. But he remains on guard, because as long as he can remember, his body and his soul have been enemies.

To read all of Waltzer’s McNeil profile, go here. Since publication of the piece, McNeil and tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry have released a successor CD to Rediscovery. Rifftides reviewed Chill Morn He Climb Jenny in December. To read the review, click here.
In case you missed it when we posted it in October, here’s a live version of one of the tunes the McNeil-McHenry quartet included in that album recalling west coast jazz. It’s a popular song from 1945 that Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker recorded in the early 1950s.

As 2010 wound down, it appeared that the venerable Detroit jazz club Baker’s Keyboard Lounge might be sold to someone who would make it into a dollar store. That sent a shock through the city’s jazz community, which has heard major musicians at Baker’s for more than three-quarters of a century. As Mark Stryker reported last week in The Detroit Free Press:

Baker’s has been integral to Detroit’s cultural identity as a jazz mecca for so long, it’s hard for musicians, aficionados and even casual fans to conceive of the city without it. Detroit-born saxophone star James Carter*, who grew up inspired by the heroes he heard at Baker’s, calls it “holy ground.”
“You join this caravan of cats who have been there and made musical and spiritual contributions beyond measure,” he said.

The caravan has included Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie and a parade of Detroiters who came to musical maturity in the city, among them Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Pepper Adams, Yusef Lateef and Hank, Thad and Elvin Jones. Baker’s got a stay of execution yesterday in a bankruptcy auction. The new owners say that they intend to keep it a jazz club and spiff it up. One of them said, “Baker’s is a gem of Detroit and we’re going to treat her as a wife. We’re going to clean her up and make her feel good.” To read Stryker’s report on the sale and see a gallery of photos from Baker’s, click here.
*James Carter was not only inspired at Baker’s but is one of dozens of musicians who have recorded at the Lounge.

Following Stephanie Link’s performance in the January 31 exhibit, perhaps you were wondering about stride piano’s influence on modern jazz. Wonder no more. Kindly pay attention to Thelonious Monk’s left hand.

Monk was a busy fella at the Berlin Jazztage in 1969. He played several pieces by Duke Ellington and some of his own. The Berliners also teamed him Joe Turner, not the singer but one of the last of the authentic masters of the first stride generation. Monk and Turner played a blues in honor of Ellington. Stu Martin is the drummer, Hans Rettenbacher the bassist. Turner looks as if he wonders whether he’ll get his licks in, but toward the end, he does.

For more of Monk on Ellington, this classic 1955 album has him playing eight Ellington compositions with bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny Clarke. It was his first album for the Riverside label, and it had a great deal to with Monk’s rise from the insider’s favorite jazz eccentric to general recognition as one of the music’s great originals.

Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

I’m famous. Ain’t that a bitch!

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.—Miles Davis

Leave it to the piano players to know who the piano players are. Slightly more than a year ago, Alan Broadbent introduced Rifftides readers to Chris Dawson. Now, Alan alerts us to Stephanie Trick of St Louis, Missouri. She studied classical piano from the age of five. When she was 10, her teacher introduced her to ragtime and stride. She fell in love with the genre and mastered it, and now the worldwide network of stride enthusiasts is in love with her. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her following expand to a wider audience. Mr. Broadbent describes Ms. Trick as “the real deal” and comments on her “rock-solid” left hand.
If you’re not accustomed to willowy young women emulating James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Willie The Lion Smith, get used to it, is my advice. Here is Ms. Trick in concert last New Year’s Eve in St. Louis with James P’s “Modernistic.”

Embedding is disabled on a clip of Stephanie Trick’s riveting performance of Willie The Lion’s “Keep Your Temper.” You can see and hear it by clicking here. To learn more about her, go here.

The veteran Polish Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s late-blooming fame puts him in demand around the world. His reflective musings often inspire reviewers to compare him to Miles Davis. Davis was an inspiration, but Stanko long since absorbed, internalized and personalized the influence. Tonight he is playing in Australia at the Sydney Festival with his band of young Scandinavians. In the Sydney Morning Herald, John Shand traced Stanko’s career, including his importance to the film composer Krsystof Komeda.

Komeda was the composer/pianist who penned scores for several Polanski films, including Rosemary’s Baby. Stanko stayed for six years, absorbing the potential for a distinctly European jazz. ”Komeda started to write very modern compositions,” recalls Stanko, ”and he needed a free [improvising] player. I was maybe the only free player in Poland at this time.”
He was the vinegar in Komeda’s melodic dressings; it was only when Komeda died in 1969 that Stanko devoted himself to his own music. Often the stimulus came from poetry, painting or film. ”I was always into art. My first guru was Van Gogh, and then Modigliani, now I am really a fan of any kind of visual art.”
With his current quintet – which has two Finns (pianist Alexi Tuomarila and drummer Olavi Louhivuori) and two Danes (guitarist Jakob Bro and bassist Anders Christensen) – he recorded The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsch, inspired by an Oskar Kokoschka portrait in New York’s Neue Galerie. The gallery is a 15-minute walk from Stanko’s apartment, and he often goes there for stimulus.

To read the whole piece, go here.
That quintet toured Poland in 2009. Here they play a Stanko composition called “So Nice,” which you are unlikely to confuse with the Brazilian pop tune of the same title.

When the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Awards ceremony and associated events happened a couple of weeks ago, I was caught on the horns of a deadline dilemma and had to skip the televised proceedings. I’ve been catching up with the honors to David Liebman, Hubert Laws, Orrin Keepnews, Johnny Mandel and the Marsalises. Better late than never. The ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City on January 11 ran long, although not as long as some previous years’ events. It included nicely made five-minute mini-documentaries about each of the 2011 jazz masters. We’ll show you two of them and lead you to the others.
The group award to Ellis Marsalis and his sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason stirred up criticism. The criticism is water over the dam; the award went to most of that extraordinary New Orleans family. My only substantial reservation is that Dolores Marsalis, the matriarch whose strength is the family’s center, wasn’t named on the plaque.

The NEA portrait of Keepnews came close to giving an understanding of what a gifted producer can do for music.

To find the video portraits of all five of the masters for this year and several earlier ones, go here. To see the entire two-hour NEA ceremony in streaming video, click here. And if that isn’t enough for you, click here and see a panel discussion, complete with at least one surreal speech in the guise of a question from the audience.

An old bit of confusion revived for a time this week when Mosaic Records announced a Stan Getz box set to be issued next spring. The electronic news release about the 1950s Getz quintet recordings for Norman Granz’s Norgran label mentioned Getz, Bob Brookmeyer and “pianist Johnny Williams (who later became film composer John Williams).”

After several people hopped on the web with corrections, Mosaic commander-in-chief Michael Cuscuna explained, “Earlier version of the write-up got pasted in by mistake.” Mosaic corrected the goof. Here is further clarification. The man on the left below is John Thomas Williams, the pianist who worked with Getz, Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Cannonball Adderley in the ’50s. The man on the right is John Towner Williams, who had a brief career as a jazz pianist and went on to Star Wars and the Boston Pops.

For a few decades the “Yes” John Williams took side trips into successful careers in banking and government. He lives in Florida and, at 82, still plays gigs, mostly solo piano. When I spoke with him this morning, he sounded content, although he allowed that he wouldn’t mind having the “No” John Williams’s royalty income. To further dissipate confusion, here’s a rerun of a Rifftides piece about him that first appeared on April 18, 2006. It contains a link to a reissue CD of Williams’ widely praised trio records.

THAT John Williams

During long stretches of 1953 and ’54, John Williams was the pianist in Stan Getz’s quintet and quartet. Wiliams is often described in biographies as a disciple of Bud Powell who was also influenced by Horace Silver. That is true. It is also true that oxygen influences flame, a fact that tells us nothing about the differences among flames. In the population of pianists influenced by Powell and Silver, Williams was identifiable by a keyboard touch that produced a spikey, percussive, rollicking forward motion, an infectious swing. Almost in contradiction, at the same time he somehow achieved a smoothness of phrasing that invested his improvised lines with the logic of inevitability. He managed to make his listeners anticipate what was coming in a solo and yet surprise them when he got there.

Williams’ first album under his own name was John Williams, a ten-inch LP on the Emarcy label, recorded in 1954. His trio had Bill Anthony on bass and the unique Detroit drummer Frank Isola, fellow members of the Stan Getz group. Williams jokes today that he often wonders who got the third copy of the album after he and his mother each bought one. It may not have been a big seller, but it quickly became a favorite of musicians and, after Emarcy pulled it, of collectors. In the 1990s, a broker of rare LPs who sold to Japanese LP zealots told me that a mint copy of John Williams was going in Japan for upwards of $300. I blush to confess that I sold him my beat-up copy for considerably less than that, making him wait while I first copied it to tape. As we listened, I hummed along to Wiliams’ solos, so embedded in my brain had they become over four decades of nearly wearing out the album.

It was a puzzle, given the LP’s iconic status, why Emarcy did not reissue it on CD, and why Verve did not bring it out after the company acquired the Emarcy catalog. A good guess is that the decision was made by accountants. Time has cured that ill. Copyright laws in Spain declare that after fifty years, recorded material is fair game (I’m not sure that’s the exact wording of the law). So, the resourceful Fresh Sound label has put on one CD John Williams and the pianist’s second Emarcy album, a twelve-inch LP called John Williams Trio, recorded in 1955. This belated event probably doesn’t do much for the inflated price of the original LPs, but it is a boon to the substantial number of Williams fans who have been clamoring for a reissue. It may also gain him new fans.

The second album, done in three sessions with shifting personnel among bassists and drummers, doesn’t have quite the concentrated charm of the ten-inch 1954 session. That is in part, I suspect, because Frank Isola is on only one track. Nonetheless, it has wonderful moments. Taken together, the twenty tracks capture John Williams when his playing was full of freshness, vigor and peppery lyricism. By all accounts, including the evidence of an appearance with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, it still is. He has never stopped playing, but he took a few decades off to become a banker and, for twenty years, a city commissioner of Hollywood, Florida. In conversation, Williams tends to deprecate his playing in the 1950s as inadequate, an evaluation that flies in the face of the wisdom of his employers–StanGetz, Bob Brookmeyer, Cannonball Adderley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims among them–and of listeners who have been stimulated by his work for half a century.

I should point out, although by now it may be obvious, that this John Williams is not the Star Wars John Williams.

For news about the Getz Quintet reissue featuring THAT John Williams, go here.