It is neither Al Cohn’s birthday (November 24, 1925) nor the anniversary of his death in 1988. As on any day, it is simply a good time to listen to the great tenor saxophonist. We hear and see him in two festival performances filmed the year before he died. First, he was at Italy’s Sanremo Jazz Festival with pianist Rein De Graaf, bassist Harry Emmery and drummer Erik Ineke. They played a good old B-flat Blues, beginning and ending it with a chorus of King Oliver’s “Chimes Blues” from 1923.

When we posted this visit with Jack Brownlow a couple of years ago, response was enthusiastic and dozens of readers asked if we planned to make it an annual feature. I’m not sure that we’ll carry the commitment that far, but we are delighted to bring it to you again this year. Please enjoy the music and let the Rifftides staff know your response.

First published on December 23, 2015

The pianist Jack Brownlow (1923-2007), known to his friends as Bruno, was a constant correspondent. Over the years, he stayed in touch by letter, postcard, telephone and recordings. At Christmas time he brightened the season for our family with music he taped at the grand piano in the living room of his house in Seattle. Just once, when we were living in New Orleans, he made his Christmas recording using the Fender-Rhodes electric piano. Something about that instrument invested his Christmas songs with unusual sprightliness at up-tempos and a contemplative quality at slow ones; all with his special harmonic gift.

Wherever we have lived—east, west, north and south—Bruno’s 1969 Christmas medley has ushered in the Yuletide season and played through New Year’s Eve. This time around, we’re sharing it. It runs more than forty minutes. You may wish to save it for a relaxed period during your holiday. Following the music is a list of tunes in the medley, with a few notes by Bruno in quotation marks. “Jimnopodae” was for his friend and bassist Jim Anderson. He named “Karen” after his youngest daughter.

Bruno wrote, “I have recorded a little every night when I get home from the gig. I plugged directly from the Fender into the tape machine, so it is monaural, necessarily. There are probably mistakes, but I didn’t re-record anything.”

Ben Webster and Joe Zawinul, Soulmates (Original Jazz Classics)

Saxophonist Gary Foster recently asked if I remembered the liner notes that Bill Evans wrote for the 1963 Ben Webster-Joe Zawinul album Soulmates. Gary’s question led to the discovery that my LP of that treasure had somehow migrated off the shelves. I immediately ordered a CD replacement. Evans wrote infrequently, but when he did—unsurprisingly—his way with words had much in common with the evocativeness and intellectual rigor of his piano inventions. The most famous of Evans’s regrettably few ventures into written language was for the Miles Davis Sextet’s Kind Of Blue (1959). Addressing the challenge of group improvisation, his commentary offered this thought, which has been widely quoted:

Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.

In 1963, producer Orrin Keepnews asked Evans to write notes for Soulmates, a collaboration of the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the young Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul. That was seven years before Zawinul and Wayne Shorter formed their influential group Weather Report. In his essay, Evans returned at greater length to the matter of jazz group improvisation. He distinguished between it and formal composition:

The great composers as we know them may have been forced to many compromises in style because of the necessity of notating in such a way that the interpretive link could be used to preserve their music for future generations.

I was led to these thoughts, and to the others that follow here, as the magnificent maturity of Webster’s music impressed itself on my mind. The great emotional scope revealed by a craft couched in simplicity is an accomplishment not easily measured, and those who do not react to anything but the spectacular or complex deserve to miss the deep satisfactions that can be gained from such an honest and mature artist.

This comment also applies to the work of Joe Zawinul and of the other players here, for each is a proven jazz performer of the first rank.

The other musicians were Thad Jones, cornet; Sam Jones, bass on four tracks; Richard Davis, bass on four tracks; Philly Joe Jones, drums. On “Soulmates,” the title piece, written by Webster, Sam Jones is the bassist.

Eddie Palmieri, Sabiduria (Ropeadope)

Twin undercurrents run through this immensely satisfying album: Palmieri’s mastery of Afro-Cuban rhythms and the deep harmonic inspiration with which he motivates himself and his musicians. The players include the veteran saxophonists Donald Harrison and Ronnie Cuber, bassist Marcus Miller and vibraphonist Joe Locke, and the rhythm section at the core of Palmieri’s bands for years—percussionists Little Johnny Rivero, Anthony Carillo, Obed Calvaire, Lusito Quintero, and bassist Luques Curtis. Drummer Bernard Purdie is a guest on the title track.

The collective experience of the musicians and the leadership of the 80-year-old Palmieri add up to the wisdom (sabiduria) of the album title. Cuber’s baritone saxophone solos explode out of the mutual admiration he and Palmieri began developing in the 1970s. On Cal Tjader’s “Samba do Suenho,” vibraphonist Joe Locke recalls the ground-breaking collaboration of Cal Tjader and Palmieri in their classic El Sonido Nuevo (1966). The album ends with the deep harmonies and irresistible time-feel of “Jibarita y Su Son,” one of eleven new compositions Palmieri wrote for the collection. This is a major addition to his extensive discography.

The singer Kevin Mahogany has died at the age of 59. As The Kansas City Star’s Timothy Finn reported today, Mahogany had only recently returned to his hometown. To read Finn’s column, with details of Mahogany’s career, go here. The post includes video of Mahogany in performance.

http://amzn.to/2yvsA1G

Jane Ira Bloom, Early Americans (Outline Records)

In a piece that lasts less than two minutes, the purity of Jane Ira Bloom’s unaccompanied soprano saxophone in a piece titled, “Nearly (For Kenny Wheeler)” all but steals Early Americans. That is quite a feat, since in most of the album her colleagues are also master musicians—bassist Marc Helias and drummer Bobby Previte. The three call upon familiarity bred in a long history of collaboration and rhythmic like-mindedness. “Hips & Sticks,” “Rhyme Or Rhythm,” “Coronets Of Paradise” and “Big Bill” are prime examples of the trio’s ability to generate grooves and manipulate them in terms of tempo, density and coloration without sacrificing consistency of swing. In that regard. “Gateway To Progress” is notable. Helias, Previte, Ms. Bloom and engineer Jim Anderson manage to lighten the atmosphere as Ms. Bloom’s saxophone swings around the sonic spectrum. Then, amid the relative hush, they deepen the time-feel. All of the compositions in the album are Ms. Bloom’s except for Bernstein’s and Sondheim’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story. Like the piece dedicated to the late Wheeler, it presents her without accompaniment. It is—no other word for it—gorgeous in its presentation of the melody.

The album has been out for a year or so. Somehow, it had escaped me. Now it has a home.

Noah Preminger, Meditations On Freedom (Dry Bridge Records)

Tenor saxophonist and composer Preminger timed the release of this album for the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of The United States. In the months since, it has attracted considerable attention as a protest statement. Preminger’s covers of classic songs from the Civil Rights era by Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke and others achieve his goal, as do new Preminger pieces with titles llike “We Have A Dream” and “The 99 Percent.” The album is a dramatic political and cultural document. Of equal importance: Preminger, trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Kim Cass and drummer Ian Froman make it a musical success. Preminger and Palmer solo over the spare accompaniment with passion that intensifies in moments of mutual improvisation. The instrumentation may raise thoughts of Mulligan, Giuffre and a simple past, but the music’s thoroughly 21st Century zeitgeist is rooted in our edgy times.

Guitarist Mundell Lowe died today. He was 95. Lowe’s career began at 13 when he frequently went from his home in Laurel, Mississippi, to work at clubs in New Orleans’ French Quarter. After service in World War Two, he honed his bebop skills and became one of New York’s busiest guitarists. He worked with a cross-section of major musicians including the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, pianist Billy Taylor, and his own quintet at The Embers and other clubs. He was in demand not only as a player, but after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s also as a composer for films and television series. For five years in the 1980s, he was music director of the Monterey Jazz Festival. Lowe remained active as a player well into his nineties.

One of his happiest occasional partnerships was with fellow guitarist Johnny Smith, another Southerner who was Lowe’s age and whose guitar style also developed under the influence of Charlie Christian. At a 1985 festival in Mobile, Alabama, Lowe and Smith collaborated on Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven.” Despite Lowe’s crediting the composition to Benny Goodman, Christian wrote it in 1940 when he was in Benny Goodman’s sextet and big band. Smith, on your right, has the first solo. The rhythm section is Hank Jones, piano; Monty Budwig, bass; and Alan Dawson, drums.

Mary Ann McSweeney, Urban Fado (McSweeney)

In Lisbon, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Tokyo—among other places around the world—musicians are melding jazz and Fado. Fado’s origins in Portugal extend to at least the early 1800s, and quite likely even further back than that. Like jazz, the music has folk roots and seductive emotional power that thrives on rhythmic expressiveness and melodic invention.

The New York bassist Mary Ann McSweeney may not be the first American musician to combine these sympathetic forms, but her album of chamber music effectively covers their common ground and emphasizes the poignancy of both genres. Her group, varied in size and personnel from track to track, includes veteran classical and jazz musicians. Among them are guitarist John Hart, drummers Tim Horner and Willard Dyson and the expressive violinist Sara Caswell. In their solos, saxophonists Marc Mommas and Sam Marlieri capture various aspects of the idiosyncratic Fado warmth of feeling. Ms. McSweeney’s bass, muscular and incisive, is at the beating heart of the project. Her bowing is laden with emotional power, notably so on the title track. A highlight is Nana Simopoulos’s vocal on “Esquina Do Pecado,” composed by the late singer Amália Rodrigues, a Portuguese cultural icon. Another is Margret Grebowicz vocalizing in duet with Ms. McSweeney’s arco bass on the leader’s “Portrait of Fado.” A listener spending time with this collection is likely to come away inspired to learn more about Fado and the growing inclination of musicians to explore its spiritual connection to jazz.

Ms. McSweeney’s husband is the valve trombonist Mike Fahn, a native New Yorker who spent several years in Los Angeles gigging and recording with large and small groups including those of Billy May, Lionel Hampton, Maynard Ferguson, Bill Holman Frank Strazzeri, Andy Simpkins and Jack Sheldon. He has been back in New York for several years. In the Encyclopedia of Jazz, critic Leonard Feather called Fahn “one of the few genuine virtuosos” on his instrument. Ms. McSweeney is the bassist on  East & West, recorded by Fahn quintets in New York and L.A. in 2006 and now available again. She also wrote several of the album’s arrangements, demonstrating a solid grasp of small-group dynamics. Fahn’s solo work—now tinged with bravado, now with restraint—is at its customary high level.

This 2008 post below somehow managed to lose its video. Today, a Rifftides reader asked about it, so we have restored and slightly moderated it. The post first appeared on June 20, 2008.

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Recently, I came across this quote:

Jack Reilly’s music is singular, almost private, and yet it reaches beyond his personal vision. This is music that speaks to the colllective spirit of all mankind – Bill Charlap

The quote is by a student of Reilly who is one of his most dedicated fans and has himself gone on to considerable renown. It led to a search that turned up video of Reilly in a performance that melds Chopin and Strayhorn. His subtle key changes are central to the fun and fascination.

It occurred to me around mid-afternoon that it would have been a good idea to use the band’s music as a supplement to the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis-Vanguard Orchestra Monday Recommendation (previous post). But, from the treasury of Thad & Mel performances on record and video, what to choose? The staff agreed unanimously; the band’s 1969 performance of Thad’s “Central Park North” at a 1969 concert in Denmark. As the featured soloists play, their names on the screen identify them. Everyone in the band is listed below the video.

Had Paul Desmond lived, today he would be celebrating—or, more likely, wryly acknowledging—his 93rd birthday. He was born in San Francisco on November 25, 1924. Several Rifftides readers have sent communiqués reminding me of the occasion. I might not have forgotten, but thank you for the alerts.

John Bolger, proprietor of the dave brubeck jazz website, sent a couple of photographs. In the shot on the left, he found Paul at work, presumably with the Brubeck Quartet, Desmond’s source of steady employment for seventeen years. On the right, we see Desmond captured by an uncredited photographer. It shows what Mr. Bolger describes as, “typical Paul—cigarette and cheeky grin.” The charm suggested by that shot  captivated virtually everyone who knew him. It was also a major component of his playing, recognizable at once to Desmond listeners around the world. When he died in New York on May 30, 1977, he was 52 years old.

I interviewed the playwright Jack Richardson for my biography of Paul.  He recalled what he said at the memorial service for the pal with whom he frequently dined, drank and entertained friends at Elaine’s restaurant on New York’s East Side.

I more or less said that I found him the best company of anyone I’d known in my life. I found him the most loyal friend I’ve ever had in my life. I found him the most artistic person I’ve ever known in my life. I said that his leaving will make this planet a smaller and darker place for everyone.

In The Village Voice, Nat Hentoff recalled another moment at the service.

The piano had been tuned, but nobody had played. Then, from the back of the room, a wiry, graying man, wearing a golf hat and a quizzical look not unlike Paul’s, moved almost at a run to the piano and said, ‘This is a song Paul always asked for.’

Jimmy Rowles played ‘Darn That Dream,’ fitting it to Paul’s tone and floating beat. He got up, did a small jig, and uttered a cry. Not in mourning. What Thomas Wolfe called a goat cry—to life. To Paul’s music.

So much for no immediate survivors.

“Darn That Dream” was the favorite song of Paul and his girlfriend, Jenna Whidden.

Alto saxophonist Gary Foster told me recently that for years he has owned a copy of a letter that Sonny Rollins (pictured right) sent to Coleman Hawkins (pictured left) in 1962. Intrigued and keeping in mind both mens’ characters, reputations and influence on the music, I asked to see it. After I did, I asked Mr. Foster if the letter was copyrighted and whether we could show it to the Rifftides readership. He brought a third prominent saxophonist and Rollins admirer into the discussion. Here is his answer:

 

 

I thought of Don Menza. He told me recently that he speaks regularly with Sonny. I phoned Don and he phoned Sonny a few moments ago. Don just called and said that Sonny told him the letter is not in any way protected and he would be glad to have it published. He is glad to know that there is interest in it.

With thanks to Mr. Menza for his help, Mr. Foster for inspiring the idea and —particularly—Mr. Rollins, here are the three pages of the letter.

Eight months after he wrote to Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins appeared with his idol at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival. Their rhythm section was Paul Bley, piano; Henry Grimes, bass and Roy McCurdy, drums. Here is one of the most celebrated pieces from their collaboration.

We can be thankful today that Jon Hendricks and George Avakian made so many important contributions to jazz during their long lives. Both died in New York yesterday. Hendricks was 96. Avakian was 98.

Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross formed the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross for their album Sing A Song Of Basie album in 1958. Expanding the possibilities of a craft that had been pioneered by Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, Hendricks married words to jazz tunes and to intricate instrumental solos. Critics sometimes described the results as poetry. Hendricks and Lambert, a jazz vocal-group pioneer, had been collaborators since the early 1950s. Lambert, Hendricks and Ross became immensely popular. The Basie collection was the first of several top-selling and poll-winning albums by the group. Hendricks’ activities and projects in vocal music took many turns. His “Evolution of the Blues” told how black music developed in America. It ran as a stage show in San Francisco for five years. Hendricks continued performing well into the new century, frequently in duo concerts with Ms. Ross. There is more about his long career in this New York Times obituary by Peter Keepnews.

A sophisticated and talented listener when he was an undergraduate at Yale, George Avakian persuaded Decca Records that the work of aging, free-living Chicago-style musicians should be preserved before it was too late. The result was a multi-disc collection that is often described as the first jazz album. Shortly, he also produced for the Columbia label anthologies of recordings by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Following his Army service in World War Two, Avakian was hired by Columbia and eventually brought to the label Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis. For Columbia, Warner Bros., RCA Victor and other labels, over the years he produced album by artists as diverse as his stable of jazz musicians plus the French singer Edith Piaf and the comic Bob Newhart. Later, as a free lance producer and manager, he boosted the careers of Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett. The recordings of Paul Desmond and Sonny Rollins that he produced for RCA Victor captured some of those artists’ finest work. For more on Mr. Avakian, you may again turn to a Peter Keepnews obituary in the Times.

(A personal note: When I was writing Desmond’s biography, visits to George and his wife, the classical violinist Anahid Ajemian, resulted in invaluable research contributions. We already knew one another, but those encounters deepened a friendship for which I will always be grateful.)