Blue Mitchell - Fun With Fusion
Posted On: July 26, 2008 [Respond / Archives]
If you had told me a year ago that I would have a genre on my iPod called "Fusion" I'd have told you you were crazy. While I like a good soul jazz album as much as the next person (Jimmy Smith, Lonnie Smith, Houston Person, Boogaloo Joe Jones, et al.) once you start adding strings and vocals, that's where I draw the line. Unfortunately, it's the worst examples of fusion that tend to be the ones record companies make available to us in great numbers (Kenny G., Kirk Whalum, Tom Scott, et al), and in any case I've always found that a little Crusaders can go a long way. But recently, with the proliferation of music blogs like My Jazz World, such an incredible number of fusion albums have been made available to the public that it forced me into a re-examination of the whole genre.
The fact that for decades the CTI catalog has been the most visible (read avalable) fusion on the market has done a real disservice to everyone, from the record companies right down to the consumer. In the first place, I find the CTI sessions the least compelling fusion albums that I've heard over the last year. Just one example of this phenomenon is the great Blue Mitchell. After his tenure with Riverside in the early sixties, he signed with Blue Note when he and Junior Cook were let go of the Horace Silver quintet. After some terrific quintet albums he recorded a couple of funky big-band type sessions before his first out-and-out fusion session, Bantu Village, in 1969. After that, he recorded sessions for a number of labels (Impulse, Roulette, RCA) that are notable for their incredible consistency of quality jazz--albeit in a fusion style. Which means, if you hate Isaac Hayes, Booker T., and The Crusaders, you're probably going to hate these records too. But . . . if you've secretly kept all of your Blackbyrds, John Klemmer, and Maynard Ferguson vinyl, you'll LOVE Blue Mitchell's fusion sessions.
The thing that makes these sessions so great are the players, from pop/fusion stallwarts like Chuck Rainey and Lee Ritenour to hard bop greats like Harold Land, Cedar Walton, Hampton Hawes, and Eddie Harris. The solos are fantastic, and to lump these kinds of sessions in with no-talend smooth jazz of the last thirty years borders on the criminal. The only one of Mitchell's sessions that is available on CD is, of course, not one of his best. Though Graffiti Blues is a worthy pickup, my favorite album is Stratosonic Nuances with the great Harold Land on tenor and Cedar Walton on electric piano. But there is equally great music to be had elsewhere, as evidenced by this cover of Horace Silver's "Peace" [mp3] on the Roulette album Last Tango Blues.
Why, in this day and age, record companies can't make all of their sessions available as downloads is beyond me. I understand them not wanting to put out money and time to produce all of those lost sessions on CD, but it can't take that much effort to make albums available on iTunes, or similar sites. Fortunately, most of those lost albums are out there if you do a bit of searching. So, if you enjoy the occasional Wah-Wah pedal guitar, thumb-slapping bass, and Fender Rhodes piano, check out some of the many music blogs out there offering up hundreds of 70s fusion albums--albums that also happen to contain some fantastic jazz solos by the sixties hard bop greats who, it turns out, never really stopped playing after all.
Cecil Payne - BeBop Baritone
Posted On: July 18, 2008 [Respond / Archives]
When I was in eighth grade I was invided to join the Jr. High jazz band after only two years of playing alto sax. What surprised me most was that the band director wanted to allow one of the clarinet players to switch to alto and have me play the baritone sax. Not only was I not offended, I was fascinated by the big, school horn I was given and found the lower register quite appealing--not to mention the parts significanly easier to play. Ever since that time I've been in love with the bari sax. So it should be no surprise then, that one of the first jazz CDs I ever purchased was by the late, great, Cecil Payne.
What was a surprise for me, though, what just how great Payne was. Not only could he navigate effortlessly on the big horn, but did so playing some of the most challenging music ever: straight-ahead bebop. Like fellow saxophonist Sonny Stitt, Cecil Payne played bebop his entire career, an unabashed exponant of Charlie Parker's legacy. Payne's most definitive statement came early on in his lengthy career. The two sessions that comprise Patterns of Jazz on Savoy Records. Recorded in 1956, just a year after Parker's death, they are nothing short of stunning. The first session is a quartet, with Duke Jordan on piano and Tommy Potter on bass (both recently with Parker's band), in which Payne performs tunes associated with Parker, including "This Time The Dream's On Me," and "How Deep Is The Ocean" in addition to two distinctive originals. The second set adds yet another Parker sideman, Kenny Dorham on trumpet. Three more infectious Payne originals lead off this session with highlight of the entire album being Payne's solo opening to "Man of Moods" [mp3]. Fittingly, the album ends on a high note with Dizzy Gillespie's "Groovin' High."
Cecil Payne would appear on countless sessions in the fifties and sixties, on albums as diverse as Kenny Dorham's Afro-Cuban and Jimmy Smith's Six Views of the Blues on Blue Note, John Coltrane's Dakar on Prestige and Clark Terry's self-titled debut [Clark Terry] on EmArcy. He was one of the all-time great jazz musicians--on any instrument--and continued to appear on quality albums and tour throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Cecil Payne passed away just last November and he is greatly missed.
I'll never forget the day a few years ago when I was looking through a friend's stack of old magazines and happened upon a review for the closing of Birdland back in the late 70s. The author was lamenting the sorry state of the club--having been turned into a disco a few years earlier--and at the same time the sorry state of jazz, in that none of the musicians assembled to pay tribute to the namesake of the club actually played bebop . . . except for one, and that musician was Cecil Payne.
Red Garland - Red Alert!
Posted On: July 1, 2008 [Respond / Archives]
Until recently I had always associated Red Garland's piano playing with Miles Davis's rather stodgy attempts at hard bop, and his emphasis on block-chording in that context rather than single-note lines never really grabbed me. But my attitude toward Red changed when I picked up a copy of Phil Woods' Sugan. I already had a couple of Garland albums with John Coltrane, but they seemed a bit more subdued as well, tending toward slow, blues numbers. The set with Woods and trumpeter Ray Copeland is a no-frills Prestige blowing session, but seems to have nonetheless been an inspired date that surpasses the usual rote playing that figures into a lot of those kinds of sessions by both Woods and Garland.
Three of the tunes are by Charlie Parker and it's there where the stength of set lies--and also its superiority in comparison with similar dates. One in particular I'm thinking of is another Phil Woods bebop date produced by Leonard Feather entitled Bop!. Recorded only a month after Sugan, it seems especially tired and forced (in the way most Feather sessions were--this one featuring Parker's son shouting out an atonal "Salt pea-nuts! Salt pea-nuts!"). On the earlier session Woods seems bright and energetic on "Au Privave," [mp3] "Steplechase" and "Scrapple from the Apple." And, of course, Garland's spot-on accompaniment holds the proceedings together extremely well. One of the real treats, however, is Ray Copeland's trumpet work. Much more appropriate than Thad Jones' work on the Feather session, it nearly equals that of Carmel Jones on arguably the best of the post-bop retrospective albums ever recorded: Charles McPherson's Bebop Revisited. Finally, there are also three Woods-penned numbers that have more of a hard bop feel to them, the best being the title track.
Sparking a renewed interest in Red Garland, I have recently obtained several more discs of his and have been enjoying them all. And while I find his piano trios less interesting that say, Elmo Hope, or Ray Bryant's, many of his larger groups are quite good, the ones with Coltrane, of course, but also a terrific sextet date on Jazzland with Pepper Adams and Blue Mitchell called Red's Good Groove that contains his signature block-chord work rather than the more bopish lines of the Wood date, but does sound better than many Riverside sextet sessions from the same era. Way to go, Red.
Motown Jazz?
Posted On: June 26, 2008 [Respond / Archives]
Of course we all know that there was great Hard Bop in Detroit. The list of names speaks for itself, Barry Harris, Hank, Elvin, and Thad Jones, Pepper Adams, Kenny Burrell, Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd, Frank Foster, etc. But even as a die-hard-bop fan I was surprised to learn, on one of my forays through cyberspace, that Berry Gordy at Motown released eleven albums of jazz on one of his subsidiary labels. As Mr. Spock would say . . . fascinating.
To date I've listened to about eight of them and, while the musicianship is good, the recording quality is woefully inadequate, especially on the trio albums by pianist Johnny Griffith (not Griffin). Pianist Earl Washington fares a bit better on his albums. Trombonist George Bohanon's bossa nova album is far more bop than latin--a good thing IMHO--and there is a Jonah Jones LP that leans a bit too much in the Pete Fountain/Al Hirt faux jazz direction for my taste. But the real find is the set by alto/tenor saxophonist Lefty Edwards. Again, the recording is poorly done, but the music is fantastic. If only he'd been in New York with Rudy VanGelder, this one would probably have been a classic. On a set of mostly standards, Edwards shows a distinctive Frank Foster style, easily mixing swing and bop phrasing. The standout track for me is his interpretation of "Goodnight, My Love" [mp3], his double-time work on the alto bringing instantly to mind Sonny Stitt.
Evidently Berry Gordy was able to entice some of the remaining local jazz musicians in Detroit to come and play on Motown sessions by offering them recording sessions of their own on the Motown Jazz label. It would be nice to see if someone could take the master tapes--assuming they still exist--and clean them up for CD reissue. Until then you can find the LPs on the fullundie music blog. While maybe not keepers, worth a download or two.
Dinah Washington
Posted On: June 23, 2008 [Respond / Archives]
Though she'll always be know as the Queen of the Blues, I'm not shy about making the argument for Dinah Washington as one of the all-time great jazz singers. Certainly she's always been my favorite. Sure, she doesn't have the range and musicality of Sarah Vaughn, or the fragile intangible that is Billie Holiday. What she does possess, however, is a swaggering confidence in her own abilities that that threatens, at times, to overshadow the song itself. Rather than than finger-in-her-dimple ebullience of Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah isn't afraid to put one hand firmly on her hip and with the other to wag that finger right in your face.
The voice is really the thing, though. At once nasal and lacking in dynamics, it is also the most sublime of instruments, in the same way that blues shouters from Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams to soul-men like Lou Rawls and Ray Charles have been able to make incredibly fine jazz albums. While Dinah began her jazz in less than stellar form, beginning with risqué blues numbers backed by the Lucky Thompson and Illinois Jacquet orchestras, then working through dreary string and chorus-ladened Mitch Miller arrangements, she found her form on her mid-fifties EmArcy sessions.
The pinnacle of this era is easily her 1955 session For Those In Love. Joining her is an especially sympathetic group of musicians including Clark Terry, Jimmy Cleveland, Paul Quinchette, Cecil Payne, and Wynton Kelly. With arrangements by Quincy Jones it is a sterling performance. One jazz classic after another is reeled off by Washington with what are arguably definitive performances of Cole Porter's "I Get A Kick Out Of You," and the Rodgers-Hart "I Could Write A Book." But the gem of the session is, without a doubt, her haunting performance of "You Don't Know What Love Is."
One year earlier Dinah was in the studio with an augmented Brown-Roach unit (Clifford Brown, Harold Land, Junior Mance, George Morrow and Max Roach) to record Dinah Jams, a live-in-the-studio LP for EmArcy that I have samples of to whet your appetite for my own personal "Queen of Jazz." The first is a classic example of her ballad delivery on "Come Rain or Come Shine" [mp3], wonderfully robust and vulnerable at the same time-with a gospel "hallelujah" middle chorus that elicits hollers and applause from the studio audience. The second is an equally explosive "There Is No Greater Love" [mp3], with a trumpet-like smear that turns the notion of a ballad being soft on its head. Check out some of her work on EmArcy and see if Dinah doesn't turn your head as well.
Max Roach
Posted On: August 16, 2007 [Respond / Archives]
One of the all-time greats passed away today, Max Roach, the brilliant drummer, composer, activist and educator. My first exposure to Max was on Charlie Parker's recordings. What struck me immediately was the incredible precision of his playing. Unlike other boppers like Bud Powell and even Dizzy Gillespie who could, at times, sound very sloppy, Max's playing always seemed crisp and precise--like Bird himself. But it was his recordings with Clifford Brown, and the introduction to Max's melodic style of drumming, that won me over.
In 1990 I had the good fortune to see the Max Roach Quartet with trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope at Seattle's Jazz Alley. Again, what impressed me the most was his melodic approach to the drums. Now, while the drums in bebop had been liberated from mere timekeeping since WWII, there were few drummers who took advantage of that fact in the way that Max did. Unlike most drum solos where musicians need to count measures in their head to know when to come back in, Max would always keep the melody in the forefront of his playing. Even when stretching out, in the same way you can hear the underlying chords in a melody instrument's solo, you could hear the melody amid his percussion improvisiation. Check out "Drum Conversation" [mp3] from 1953.
My favorite albums among Max's work are the the two albums with Clifford Brown titled Study In Brown and More Study In Brown. I also really enjoy his disc with Hank Mobley on Chess records simply titled Max, and of course the disc with Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham that he recorded shortly after Brownie's death, Max Roach Plus Four
Opening Pandora's Box!
Posted On: August 14, 2007 [Respond / Archives]
Over the past few years I've tried virtually every Internet radio station/setup/site there is and nothing has impressed me in the slightest. I'd much rather simply listen to my iPod rather than attempt to figure out to make some of these stations work--never mind finding something I actually don't hate listening to. Well, I was blown away yesterday evening when I logged on to Pandora Radio. I couldn't believe my ears. But before I get to the great sounds, let me back up a bit.
In monetizing my site I have recently decided to play host to Google ads via their AdSense program, and one of the things you promise not to do in their agreement is click on any of the links. Okay, no big deal. But some of them do look interesting. So every once in a while I open a new browser tab and punch in the URL. Well, Pandora Radio immediately blew me away. It simply asked me to type in a song or artist I liked--I chose Horace Silver--and away it went. It immediately began playing "Kiss Me Right" from Horace's Doin' the Thing album on Blue Note, then followed it up by another Blue Note cut from Jackie McLean's Capuchun Swing album, a disc I don't own. Soon I began adding other artists and before long I had my own radio station. Just like that!
Now, while this probably sounds like one of those online-blogger-promo-for-money posts . . . It's not. I was just so completely floored by the ease and the sound--the entire concept, really, that I just had to share my good fortune with anyone who might stumble upon this post. The site picks tunes that match up with what you like, and it does a really nice job. You can decide if you don't like a tune and not only will it not play any more like that but it stops playing it immediately. Best of all, Pandora is absolutely free. There are add ons you can get to download songs, etc., but for me I just like cranking up my own radio station while I work. I can't say enough good things about Pandora. If you haven't already . . . get it!
The End of the (Jazz) Message
Posted On: August 11, 2007 [Respond / Archives]
I've had a jazz DVD on my shelf for the better part of a year now, and I finally put it on last night and watched the whole thing in one glorious pass, stereo speakers blaring and a glass of wine at my elbow. The disc features taped performances of various European concerts from the 1970s with the likes of Kenny Drew, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Red Rodney and Dizzy Gillespie--though the addition of several songs by Willie Dixon also on the disc are an odd pairing with the rest. Sound and video limitations aside, it's about what you'd expect from aging boppers past their prime: wonderfully heart-warming, but nothing musically memorable. Nevertheless, there were some nice moments: a young Victor Lewis playing with Getz, outstanding trio work by Drew, and the Marsalis boys playing with Art Blakey.
The DVD is called Jazz Collection: The Legends Series, and as I watched Blakey and the other jazz giants it made me wonder again if there will ever be any jazz giants in the future. I know there have been numerous and frequent eulogies for jazz in recent years, so I'll resist going there, but the question remains. What will jazz be like in twenty years when everyone who ever played with Charlie Parker is dead? The "Young Lions" from the 80s--when the Marsalis boys were Jazz Messengers--never really panned out. Oh, there were some fantastic albums, Ralph Moore with the Ray Brown Trio, Mike Smith's second album for Delmark, and Christopher Hollyday's debut on Novus are still some of my favorite discs of all time. But that was twenty years ago!
Hollyday's brilliant Parker/McLean melange is now doing work in the service of Smooth Jazz (the acoustic jazz equivalent of Satanism), while Smith has disappeared almost completely, and Ralph Moore, god bless him, has taken refuge along with fellow Lion Kevin Eubanks in the Tonight Show band. With the end of the training ground for young musicians in the bands of greats like Blakey, Betty Carter, Ray Brown, and--for a short while--Horace Silver, it's doubtful that the great performing tradition of jazz groups crisscrossing the country will ever revive. Likely, things will revert to the way they were before recording came along, artists content to make a name for themselves locally--with, of course, the added 21st Century update of having their independent label recordings available world wide on the Internet.
The thing is, this is not like the passing of Arena Rock or Disco. Jazz has survived in the same basic combo form since Louis Armstrong, and so it's not the "style" that determines the music it's the intent of the musician. The willingness to learn an instrument so well as to be able to improvise should have more reward than the once-a-semester performance in a high school or college jazz band. So with the need to make an actual living coming face to face with the a black hole where once there were gigs to aspire to, it's no wonder that musicians decide not to pursue careers in jazz after college (not that I think college is a very good training ground for jazz . . . but that's another post.) Soon--if it hasn't already happened--the jazz message of Blakey, et al. will be nothing more than a faint echo and there will be no one left to take up the cry.
