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Georg Riedel: Dance Music: Georg Riedel Meets Ekdahl/Bagge Big Band
by Jack Bowers
Czech-born, Swedish-bred bassist Georg Riedel, best known as a composer of ten or more film scores, returns to his first love, big-band jazz, to conduct an evening of Dance Music with Sweden's world-class Ekdahl/Bagge Big Band, recorded in June 2019 at Fasching Jazz Club in Stockholm. Before arriving at “Dance Music," the hour-long concert opens with Riedel's three-part “Song for Nobody," also suitable for dancing and well-received by the audience at Fasching. Part 3, a lovely ballad, ...
read moreFlorian Ross: Architexture
by Jerome Wilson
Writing about music has been compared to dancing about architecture, in that it is a supposedly useless task. Writing music about architecture is a worthwhile proposition, though, as shown by this release from German pianist Florian Ross, composing music for his quartet and the Event Wind Ensemble which is inspired by famous architects and buildings he has encountered in his travels. This music plays like an updating of the Third Stream genre, combining classical formality and jazz fluidity. ...
read moreConte Candoli: Sincerely, Conte
by Richard J Salvucci
On the old Tonight Show (as in Carson, not Leno, much less Parr), I once remember “Conte Candoli unwinding a great solo on “King Porter Stomp." No surprise, I guess, for a guy who cut his teeth with the big bands of the late 1940s. But as he went into his second chorus, he quoted “Epistrophy," whose juxtaposition, as I recall, killed me. “Where did that come from?" But I guess it made sense, because Candoli was a bopper at ...
read moreSteven Mayer: Louis Moreau Gottschalk: A Night in the Tropics / Solo Piano Music
by C. Michael Bailey
New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829--1969) was the first important American composer and pianist. The son of a Jewish business man and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was urbane and cosmopolitan is a way not typical for the period. He composed and played on a Chickering piano as big as a house and heavy as a battleship with a showman's personality to match. He forged his reputation by fusing the European classical tradition with American musical elements like folk music, ...
read moreBuffalo Philharmonic Orchestra / Jo Ann Falletta: Duke Ellington: Black, Brown, and Beige
by C. Michael Bailey
Naxos Records' American Classics imprint was intended to highlight the domestic classical repertoire. This includes reaching from John Philip Sousa wind works and John Adams operas to Charles Ives songs and Leonard Bernstein Broadway shows. Jazz made a claim with the imprint, and the America Classics eventually included recordings of Scott Joplin rags, Art Tatum piano improvisations, George Gershwin extended concert pieces and William Grant Still symphonies. Oddly absent has been Edward Kennedy “Duke" Ellington...until now. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, ...
read moreBill Evans: The Sesjun Radio Shows
by Dan McClenaghan
Bill EvansThe Sesjun Radio ShowsOut Of The Blue/Naxos2011 (1973-79) Pianist Bill Evans (b. 1929, d. 1980) changed the way of the piano trio, beginning with a handful of brilliant studio recording for Riverside Records in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A pair of live recordings for the label, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, both released in 1961, cemented his reputation as a genius and agent of ...
read moreArt Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: The Sesjun Radio Shows
by Dan McClenaghan
The old and irksome “but is it jazz" argument has probably never been brought into play when it comes to drummer/bandleader Art Blakey (1919-1990) and his ever-changing line-up of Jazz Messengers. The music Blakey and his usually young players made was most certainly jazz, of the hard bop, hard-charging variety--brash and brightly hued, and joyously swinging. The Jazz Messengers, active from the early 1950s until the mid-'80s, was an on-the-job Jazz university, graduating such luminaries as Clifford Brown, ...
read moreBuffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta: Marcel Tyberg: Symphony No. 3, Piano Trio
by C. Michael Bailey
Often, the story behind the music makes it that much more compelling. Marcel Tyberg was an Austrian composer of certain repute, his Symphony No. 2 being premiered by friend Rafael Kubelik in the early 1930s. But not much else was heard from this composer. Tyberg was a Jew, in danger of Gestapo deportment in 1943, who entrusted his music manuscripts to his close friend, Italian physician Milan Mihich. Tyberg is thought to have perished in Auschwitz within sight of the ...
read morePhilippe Quint: Paganini arr. Kreisler: La campanella - Le Streghe - La Cenerentola and Tancredi Variations
by C. Michael Bailey
A modern parallel to the Romantic period relationship of Nicolo Paganini and Fritz Kreisler might be guitarists Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. The younger men of the pairs arranged and played the music of the older musicians, adding their own shine to the compositions. Everyone in the quartet was a showman in the extreme. But the genesis of such behavior in performers began with Paganini and his buddy Franz Liszt. Paganini was a mercurial enigma, whose violin talent continues ...
read morePhilip Edward Fisher: Handel: Keyboard Suites 1
by C. Michael Bailey
Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti (not to mention Francois Couperin and Dieterich Buxtehude) were not the only figures of the High Baroque to compose memorable keyboard music. George Frideric Handel composed two sets of eight keyboard suites each, published in 1720 and 1733, respectively, that remain highly regarded. These suites are comparable to those of Bach (English Suites (BWV 806-811), French Suites, BWV 812-817, Partitas, BWV 825-830) in structure, both men composing in the Baroque suite du danses form ...
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