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On her blog, Carol Sloane (pictured above) observes the birthday of Carmen McRae (1920-1994), the woman she calls her, “girl friend, confidant and Sister Singer Superior.” The two singers had a long, rare, honest, sometimes tempestuous friendship that lasted until Carmen’s death. For Ms. Sloane, the friendship continues. Her remembrance incorporates video of McRae in concert in 1988. Tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan is the guest artist with Carmen and her trio. To read Sloaney’s tribute and see the video of McRae at the height of her powers singing lots of Thelonious Monk, among other songs, go to SloaneView.

For an account of the night Carmen came to my rescue, see this Rifftides post from 2008.

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Pianist Bill Mays and trumpeter-flugelhornist Marvin Stamm are just back from a European tour. One of their trip’s highlights was a March 20 concert in Cologne, Germany, with the formidable WDR Big Band. The theme was New York State Of Mind, with compositions by Mays, Stamm, George Gershwin, Billy Joel and Duke Ellington, among others. The pair’s exhaustive preparation for the concert included Mays arranging Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme” with complexity, irony and wit that I can imagine would have given Monk enormous pleasure. Both visiting Americans play impressively throughout, as do the resident soloists of the WDR BB. Stamm’s playing on “New York State of Mind” and Mays’s on “52nd Street Theme” deserve special mention. Rich DeRosa conducted the band and arranged “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Mays wrote all the other arrangements.

The WDR has posted audio of the concert on its website. It will be there for 30 days. Fair warning for non-German speakers: Most of the narration is in German. Mays’s, Stamm’s and DeRosa’s announcements are in English. The music is in Esperanto.

Additional warning: as far as I can discover, there is no possibility of fast-forwarding or rewinding the concert audio. There is a Pauserien (pause) button. In the course of a two-hour concert, that could come in handy. To find the WDR Big Band website and listen to the concert, go here.

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Rudresh Mahanthappa, Bird Calls (ACT)

Listeners steeped in the music of Charlie Parker may be able to detect clues to the inspirations for Mahanthappa’s new compositions in this stimulating collection. If doing so adds to their enjoyment and appreciation of the album, so much the better. But in approaching the collection as a blindfold test, literalists may miss the point. Alto saxophonist Mahanthappa has taken Parker, his primary muse, as the point of departure for compositions and playing of unfailing originality. Individuality is what Bird achieved in his own playing and what he urged other musicians to pursue. For Mahanthappa, that means incorporating the influence of his Indian heritage, as he does with panache in “On The DL” (based on “Donna Lee”) and several other pieces. Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, pianist Mat Mitchell, bassist Francis Moutin and drummer Rudy Royston round out this powerful quintet.

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The bossa nova phenomenon infused jazz and popular music with fresh ways of thinking about rhythm and about story telling through music. It arrived when rock and roll was firmly established, the Beatles were beginning to dominate music on the radio and hardly a week passed without another boy band taking its place in the pop firmament. Brazilian music was a distinct contrast and, to many, a relief. Fortunately, it has remained a small but rewarding strain in popular music and a vital part of jazz. The past few months have seen a profusion of recordings by Brazilians and others who are captivated by the music that half a century ago swept from Brazil around the globe.

Eliane Elias, Made in Brazil (Concord)

The pianist and singer’s latest tribute to her native land begins with “Brasil (Aquarela do Brasil)” and ends with “No Tabuleiro de Baiana,” both by Ary Barroso (1903-1964), Brazil’s patriarch of modern popular songwriting. It is to Elias’s credit that the six new songs she wrote for the album keep comfortable company with those by Barroso and two other heroes of Brazilian music, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Roberto Menescal.

Menescal blends his voice with Elias’s in his classic “Você” and backs her on guitar in that piece and his “Rio,” both augmented with a string orchestra. The sessions include rhythm players from Brazil’s corps of talented musicians. Mark Kibble and the vocal group Take 6 provide background vocals for a lush version of “Waters of March,” the first time, surprisingly, that Elias has recorded that Jobim masterpiece. She has additional vocal assistance in the album from her daughter Amanda Brecker and the prolific Brazilian pop musician Ed Motta. Her bassist husband Marc Johnson does not solo, but his solid foundation is important to the success of several pieces, including “Some Enchanted Place,” an Elias composition whose lyric he wrote with her.

Johnson’s lyric to her “Driving Ambition,” an homage to—or maybe a spoof of—the Beatles’ “Drive My Car,” incorporates a succession of rhyming words that lack profound meaning but help advance the song’s bossa nova rhythm and a series of interesting harmonic modulations. An impressive pianist influenced by Bud Powell and Bill Evans, Elias has continued to fashion her solos using increasingly sophisticated harmonies and judiciously timed silences. “Some Enchanted Place” contains one example, her short improvisation on “Searching,” another.

This is the first album Elias has recorded in Brazil since she moved to the United States more than three decades ago. She set herself a challenge as producer, composer, arranger, pianist, lyricist, star and cover model. The result is a fine addition to her extensive discography.

Rodrigo Lima, Saga (JSR)

For his recording debut as a leader, guitarist and composer, Lima drew on his standing among colleagues in Rio de Janeiro to recruit veterans of Brazilian music including trombonist Raul de Souza, pianist Hugo Fattoruso, vocalist Ithamara Koorax and the godfather of Brazilian jazz, Hermeto Pascoal. His American guests are clarinetist-tenor saxophonist Anat Cohen, flutist Hubert Laws, vibist Mike Mainieri and arranger Don Sebesky. All-star considerations aside, the music is what counts, and the music is superb.

Lima’s playing on several classical, acoustic and electric guitars is marinated in Brazilian tradition and leavened with the influence of Americans like Jim Hall and Pat Metheny. An admirer of Creed Taylor’s CTI label, Lima emulates CTI with Sebesky’s rich arrangement of Lima’s “Flying Waltz” featuring Lima, Laws and a string quartet. Saga’s cover photo is by Pete Turner, who provided many CTI cover shots. de Souza’s soulful trombone work is the solo heart of Lima’s and co-producer Arnaldo De Souteiro’s arrangement of the third movement of the Brahms Third Symphony. It recalls CTI’s adaptations of classical works. Mainieri, Lima and percussionist Sammy Figueroa also make notable contributions. The engrossing two-CD collection ends with “Nosso Borogodó Caió,” totally improvised on the spot by Pascoal at the piano and Lima on classical guitar. It is saturated in Brazilian spirit.

Anat Cohen, Luminosa (Anzic)

The same can be said for Cohen’s album. It has pieces from other genres, including the electronic musician Flying Lotus’s hypnotic “Putty Boy Strut” and her own blues-inflected tenor saxophone feature “The Wein Machine.” But on clarinet, bass clarinet and tenor, Cohen’s Brazilian tinge colors the CD, delightfully in the irrepressibly happy “Espinha De Bacalhau” with its Rio-New Orleans street beat feeling; touchingly on clarinet in “Ternura” with a sense of yearning sadness that Brazilians call saudades. With Romero Lubambo’s guitar and Joe Martin’s bowed bass, her bass clarinet on Edu Lobo’s and Chico Buarque’s “Beatriz” defines how simplicity and restraint can create beauty. In Milton Nascimento’s “Cais,” by contrast, she takes the bass clarinet to a dynamic pitch of excitement before letting the piece ebb into silence. Bassist Martin, pianist Jason Lindner and drummer Daniel Freeman—Cohen’s regular rhythm section—work beautifully with their boss and several guest artists including Lubambo, guitarist Csar Garabini and accordionist Victor Goncalves, who is crucial to the success of the memorable “Ternura.”

Hamilton De Holanda, Caprichos (Adventure Music)

The focus of this two-CD set is De Holanda’s mastery of the ten-string Brazilian mandolin known as the bandolim. He is a wizard of the instrument, as he fully demonstrates in 24 caprices that he wrote. Seven are unaccompanied solos. The rest are duo or trio collaborations. Among the highlights is a breath-taking duet with harmonicist Gabriel Grossi on “Sky Caprice.” In “Spain Caprice,” De Holanda jousts with bassist Andre Vasconcellos and percussionist Thiago Da Serrinha. “Brazilian Caprice” is notable for turns of thematic surprise and Da Serrinha’s dazzling work with wire brushes. Accordionist Alessandro Kramer appears only once, in a duet with De Holanda on the lightning-fast “Waltz Caprice.” One track with a player this good isn’t enough. In a brief album note, De Holanda writes that his caprices are, “…poems of musical notes, instrumental songs that allow the pleasure of listening while simultaneously engaging the fingers in their technical development.” If you don’t have a mandolin handy for the pursuit of finger development, rest assured that De Holanda’s caprices give the ears and brain plenty of listening development.

Harry Allen’s All-Star Brazilian Band, Flying Over Rio (Arbors)

The tenor saxophonist takes the album title from Duduka Da Fonseca’s song and employs the veteran Brazilian in his rhythm section, along with bassist Nlson Matta, guitarist Guilhereme Monteiro and pianist Klaus Mueller, who was born in Germany but did much of his growing up in Brazil. The repertoire is replete with six pieces by Jobim and others by Brazilians including Matta, Ivan Linz and Johnny Alf. Allen’s affinity for Brazilian idioms and his proficiency in them has grown impressively over the years as he expanded his stylistic range.

An indicator that he has moved solidly onto his own territory is the authority with which he claims “The Girl From Ipanema,” playing only one phrase that that echoes Stan Getz, the tune’s virtual patent holder among tenor players. Mueller stamps his Brazilian musical passport with his composition “Bute Papo” and his light, rhythmic, playing on it. The tremulous quality of Maucha Adnet’s voice may be essential to the drama of the emotional effect she achieves in several songs in Portuguese, and Jobim’s “Bonita” sung in English. In this relaxed album, Allen sounds thoroughly at home with the Brazilian material and his Brazilian companions.

Sergio Mendes, Magic (Okeh)

Mendes capitalized on the bossa nova wave 50 years ago, captured extensive airplay and made his Brazil ’66 group a popular success. The pianist, arranger, sometime vocalist and fulltime impresario is still finding ways to build ear-catching combinations of instruments and voices over the samba beat. As always, Mendes embraces current trends in pop music and advances in recording techniques. In Magic, he manages to assemble a cast with members as varied as the venerable Brazilian star Milton Nascimento, the rapper known as will i. am, former Weather Report bassist Alphonso Johnson, pop singer John Legend, the multifaceted Bahian entertainer Carlinhos Brown and longtime Mendes vocalist Gracinha Leporace (Mrs. Mendes). Leporace and fellow singer Alia Menezes tear it up on Mika Mutti’s lusty “Samba De Roda.” Nascimento is typically irresistible in his “Olha A Rua.” Mendes allots himself a short piano solo on Legend’s feature, “Don’t Say Goodbye.” The guest stars may be crucial to the kind of pop acceptance Mendes craves, but more of his playing would have been welcome.

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When Stan Kenton was asked where jazz was going next, he said, “Tomorrow night we’ll be in Detroit.” It is in the nature of creative music that the question cannot be answered. Still, it would be less than human for someone who takes jazz—or any important music—seriously, not to speculate. It is impossible to know whether the present generation of musicians in their teens and twenties includes people who will advance the evolution of jazz into an important new phase. There are certainly enough talented musicians in that age group to make tracking their progress intensely interesting and, often, rewarding. Pianist Nick Sanders and alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl are players who fit that bill.

Twice in the past few months, Rifftides has posted performances from the collection of videos on Sanders’ and Strosahl’s YouTube channel. The pair have affinity for Charlie Parker, Herbie Nichols, Billy Strayhorn and Thelonious Monk, as well as for Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and others who contributed classics to the Great American Songbook. Next in this series—if it turns out to be a series—is a Monk composition that gave the composer and his colleagues a bit of trouble when he first recorded it in 1959. It’s called “Played Twice,” a sixteen-bar piece that may have seemed deceptively simple on paper.

The late producer Orrin Keepnews, who produced Monk’s work for Riverside Records, recalled that it took half a day and three takes in the studio until Monk was satisfied. Before we hear young Sanders’s and Strosahl’s recent performance of “Played Twice,” it can be instructive to listen to the take that Monk approved on that June day in 1959. The composer is at the piano, with Thad Jones, cornet; tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse in his first recording with Monk; Sam Jones, bass; and Arthur Taylor, drums. They play it rather deliberately here, which gives us an opportunity to absorb the tune’s form and to at least sense its harmonic complexity.

All three takes of “Played Twice” are on the OJC reissue of this Monk album, which it seems to me has never received the attention it deserves, not only because it is Rouse’s recorded debut with Monk but also because of Thad Jones’s typically warm and inventive soloing and the bass-drum partnership of Sam Jones and Art Taylor.

Strosahl and Sanders meet the challenge of “Played Twice” on at least three levels: they play it fast, they depend on one another’s time sense for rhythmic consistency—no bassist, no drummer, no rhythm guitar—and they incorporate a section of what we might assume to be free playing, except that they meticulously observe the form of the song and come out of the look-Ma-no-hands segment right on the nose, into a near-flawless final chorus.

Sanders is from New Orleans. Strosahl is from Seattle. They collaborate in Brooklyn, where so many musicians and other artists have gone to flee Manhattan’s insupportably high rents. Their YouTube channel has more than two dozen videos in which they play with enthusiasm and conciseness.

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Spike Wilner is a pianist who operates two jazz clubs in New York City with his partners Mitch Borden and Lee Kostrinsky. Smalls and Mezzrow are within a short walk of one another in Greenwich Village. They present familiar artists like Lew Tabackin, Frank Lacy, Pete Malinverni, Johnny O’Neal and Wilner himself, as well as those emerging in the jazz community—trumpeter Phillip Harper, pianist Ehud Asherie and singer Marianne Solivan among them. Of Small’s, The New Yorker wrote,

This subterranean hot spot is the quintessential jazz dive—a tiny, dark dungeon of a room with walls of brick and cobblestone, a few dozen ragtag wooden chairs, and of course, formidable music makers who play round midnight.

Periodically, Mr. Wilner (pictured below) posts an email newsletter about his clubs’ activities or simply about whatever is on his mind. What was on his mind in his most recent newsletter addresses something that concerns many veteran musicians and fans. When albums or club sets confront listeners with a dozen self-congratulatory original compositions containing no reference to anything they can relate to, listeners drop out. It doesn’t have to be that way. Mr. Wilner writes of a listening experience that is disappearing.

I recently paid a visit to my father who lives on the New Jersey shore. I took him out for a steak at a local steak house that had been there forever. We sat in the dimly lit restaurant and there in the corner was a piano and an old-timer playing it. We ordered our food and conversed, and I listened and observed this pianist. It was something that I hadn’t seen in a long time, a real cocktail pianist. Having donned a tuxedo and sat behind dimly lit pianos playing for indifferent audiences for many years, I have a deep sympathy and admiration for those who can do it.

This gentleman (who turned out, I learned later, to be 80 years old) played in a style that no longer exists. One tune after another, great old chestnuts such as “Dancing In The Dark”, “Deep In A Dream”, “Indian Summer”— one after the other in a continuous segue. Not jazz either, no “blowing” or hip originals or far out harmonies or grandstanding but just the tunes —played clearly and simply and with the most correct chord changes you’ll ever hear. I mentioned to my Pop, “This is a rarity, like seeing a dinosaur.” I observed this guy play, with a gentleness and grace, while televisions blared and people talked at the top of their lungs and some stupid kid walks by and plays “chopsticks” while the guy is in the middle of tune. He is unfazed. Just patient and playing his songs – creating a lovely background fabric for the restaurant. A lost art, indeed, this style of cocktail piano.

It made me think about humility, and particularly humility as the kind of musician who can serve a public and create a music that is not a “performance” but rather something environmental—lovely background for people as they eat and speak. In this day and age of self-proclaimed masters on Facebook, extolling their own virtues or emailing about their EPKs of their “amazing” shows to promote themselves. Or musicians who simply regurgitate what they think is hip, or the self-righteous ones who claim lineage to some kind of tradition— they all need to shut up and sit in a corner and play for five hours with minimal breaks (this guy didn’t take one in the entire time we sat there, not one).

Musicians today need to learn about service and also about taste and playing tunes correctly, really knowing those melodies and the right chords, not the ones taken from some jazz class. It’s hard to play this way. It can be crushing, but it’s real work, something that a lot of young musicians have never known or have forgotten about. Real musical work, which is to say, not playing your original tunes for a one-hour set in front of an appreciative audience but rather as a way to create background. A throwback to the days before iPods when the only way to have music in a restaurant was to hire a pianist.

It made me think about the great masters that I’ve known in my lifetime— musicians like Harry Whitaker or Mark Thompson or Walter Davis, Jr.—they were musicians who knew about work, could play in pizzerias, could play for hours without complaint, who were joyful and not slanderous but through their love of music saw only the good qualities in others—musicians, who like boulders in a river that have been rubbed smooth by the current, were natural, uncomplaining and spoke with their hearts. Humility, Taste and Grace – the highest qualities a musician can aspire to and what is most sorely needed today.

For information about Smalls, go here, about Mezzrow, go here. To subscribe to Spike Wilner’s newsletter, use this email address.

The initial version of this post gave Mitch Borden the wrong first name. We regret the error.

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St. Patrick’s Day arrives bringing a reminder of a record that never was. In the 1960s Paul Desmond and guitarist Jim Hall, frequent collaborators in those days, came up with an idea for an album of Irish music. In their planning—and possibly—drinking session, they decided on some of the tunes they would record, “The Tralee Song,” “Lovely Hoolihan” and “Fitzhugh or No One” among them. That, regrettably, is as far as the project went.

Ben Webster to the rescue. Although the Irish repertoire is not overloaded with songs that lend themselves to jazz interpretation, a notable exception is “Londonderry Air,” also known as “Danny Boy.” Webster had great affection for the tune, and it required little to persuade him to play it, always with emphasis on melody and emotion. Here he is in 1965 at the Jazhus Montmartre in Copenhagen. His rhythm section is Kenny Drew at the piano, the young bassist Niels Henning-Ørsted Pedersen, and Alex Riel on drums.

Happy St. Patrick’s day.

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The Rifftides staff now and then checks in on alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl and pianist Nick Sanders, intrepid young musicians based in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where so many rising jazz artists are headquartered. Sanders, a New Orleans native, leads his trio in a new album produced by the veteran pianist Fred Hersch. Strosahl’s debut album is planned for midyear.

A recent installment of Strosahl’s and Sanders’ occasional series of duo posts has them taking risks in a compact version of Thelonious Monk’s “Nutty.” We precede it with Monk’s initial Prestige recording of the piece with Percy Heath, bass; and Art Blakey, drums. This was September 22, 1954.

Be prepared to increase your volume for Strosahl and Sanders.

Pianist Sanders’ You Are A Creature, an album of original compositions, is getting widespread attention. From a DownBeat magazine review:

As a soloist, Sanders is a mad genius—hauntingly melodic and utterly unpredictable. Just when you think you’ve mapped his trajectory, he’s gone in a new direction, spinning off fresh, unconventional phrases.