Articles by Robert R. Calder
Brad Mehldau: Marion McPartland's Piano Jazz: Brad Mehldau
by Robert R. Calder
Part of the Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Series, this piano and conversation set, recorded in 1996, is strong on ballads, with a fresh sound from a younger Brad Mehldau. On their first date in 1958, Mehldau's father took a young lady to the Hickory House jazz club in New York and heard McPartland. They later married, and produced son Brad who appears here with the great lady jazz pianist McPartland (tickets for her 89th birthday event were ...
Continue ReadingBennie Wallace: Disorder at the Border: The Music of Coleman Hawkins
by Robert R. Calder
This is a stomping band, as Coleman Hawkins said of the Fletcher Henderson orchestra he -- and the hitherto mostly awkward tenor saxophone -- grew up together with. Louis Armstrong and his hero the great cellist Pablo Casals inspired Hawkins' phrasing and timing, Art Tatum and J.S. Bach his harmonic command. His nickname “Bean" referred to high intelligence, he was an instrumental virtuoso with immense stamina and invention qua improviser, a passionate complex man never to be underrated.
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Rough Guide to the Blues
by Robert R. Calder
It's not clear whether this CD has been compiled with the idea of it being listened to or as some kind of token or souvenir. You can have your own copy of Mamie Smith's “Crazy Blues," the first ever Blues recording? It would have been better, in representing the so-called Classic Blues, to have included Ida Cox or Chippie Hill--blues more likely to appeal to somebody who goes for Muddy Waters, rather than vaudevillian ladies. The set seems ...
Continue ReadingG.B. Walmarketeer: Used to be Texas Blues
by Robert R. Calder
If you want real blues from today, hardly any man involved in any blues revival can give you the real thing like this guy. Catch his slide-work. In the past, lots of people have doubted his capacity to deliver the real thing, taking him for just another performer with a ridiculous number of fans. Yet the fans seem to inspire him to create or at least recreate ever more and more powerful blues, though once he's really got his mojo ...
Continue ReadingSidney Bechet: Mosaic Select 23
by Robert R. Calder
Sidney Bechet Mosaic Select 23: Sidney Bechet Mosaic Records 2006
In August 2004, in a back street in the German town of Konstanz, I heard his music played by an itinerant Italian clarinetist. Days later in Spain, in front of Barcelona cathedral, I heard a different clarinetist and a different Bechet tune. Back in Germany a year later, another Italian and more Bechet.
These guys weren't even jazz musicians, unlike Evan Christopher, ...
Continue ReadingLiberation Prophecy: Last Exit Angel
by Robert R. Calder
Jacob Duncan composed the music of this very diverse set of jazz interfacing with other musics. He also penned the words for the five songs with vocals. A startlingly able altoist, the musicianship of this Louisville, Kentucky ensemble matches him at Premier League standard. Todd Hildreth's pianistic virtuosity on the initially Kurt Weill-ish “Armed Ant War" is worthy of Bösendorfer and Bartok in a big hall. Demonstrating wit and swing, he's a startling pianist with resources from ...
Continue ReadingJohn Mayall (selected by): Picking the Blues: Pioneers of Boogie Woogie
by Robert R. Calder
Veteran English blues performer John Mayall's “reminiscences" here aren't “of great blues figures" but of encounters, often via recordings, of the very best barrelhouse, blues and boogie woogie piano music. Barrelhouse piano combined various different proportions of blues, ragtime and dance rhythms in the hands of technically unorthodox players. Jelly Roll Morton spoke of “specialists --each with a tiny repertoire nobody else could play. Bang on! Cow Cow Davenport also recorded ragtime, but “Cow ...
Continue ReadingGrant Simpson: Stride and True
by Robert R. Calder
Grant Simpson hits the piano cleanly, and he sounds like he hits it hard. He mentions the “ever-present dry wit" of Dick Wellstood when introducing a performance of Wellstood's “Dollar Dance," whose composer called it “a distant relative" of Jelly Roll Morton's “Perfect Rag."
Though it's necessary to mention Wellstood's likely influence on Simpson's slowish tempo through much of the opener, James P. Johnson's “One Hour"--and Simpson's central commitment to Harlem stride piano--he emulates Morton by making a priority of ...
Continue ReadingMichael O'Neill: Ontophony
by Robert R. Calder
Ontophony means something like “the voice of being." Like several developments from traditional Scottish beginnings, this music was born in Canada: funding came from the Canada Music Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, et aliis Canadiensibus. Bagpipes don't have so ancient a history in Scotland, contrary to common misapprehensions. The bagpipe arrived relatively late by general European standards, but the creation of a very distinctive Scottish instrument and music soon followed: they sound different from other ...
Continue ReadingMilcho Leviev: Multiple Personalities: Milcho Leviev Plays the Music of Don Ellis
by Robert R. Calder
Milcho Leviev!
The exclamation mark doesn't mean I'm a special fan. I've just heard Leviev, and to hear of him again was itself exciting. Long ago he came through the Iron Curtain from a jazz and big band career in Bulgaria, worked in Germany with the supertrombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, played on a brilliant Art Pepper album, and was associated with the late maverick genius Don Ellis until Ellis' early death. No minor/marginal performer or classical graduate trying ...
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