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Photostory10: Dizzy and Duke
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
On September 18, 1970, Paul Slaughter was at the Monterey Jazz Festival photographing the performers for Transworld Features when he captured the image you see here (click to enlarge). I love Paul's photo of Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. In their expressions, you see all of the joy, confidence and playfulness of jazz and jazz-entertainment history. But rather than get ahead of the story, let me have Paul fill you in:
“This was my second Monterey Jazz Festival as a ...Continue Reading
Listen to the Bass Player: Part 4, Paul Chambers
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
For the new segment of our adventure in letting bassists be our guides, author, critic and sometime Rifftides commentator Larry Kart has a fine idea.
May I suggest, for Part 4, Paul Chambers behind Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb on “So What." Like Heath and LaFaro in their various ways, where Chambers puts “one" is a place where no one who's playing with him literally is, but it's a place that all can touch and play ...Continue Reading
Listen to the Bass Player: Part 3, Bill Crow
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
As you may recall from parts 1 and 2, our theme in this series is that by concentrating on the lines played by a good string bassist, you can gain an understanding of the shape and structure of a piece of music, feel its heartbeat, sense its soul. Duke Ellington's Jimmy Blanton in the early 1940s opened the possibilities of the bass as an improvising instrument in modern jazz. Oscar Pettiford followed, then Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Red Mitchell (this ...
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Listen to the Bass Player: Part 2, NHOP
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Let us pursue the music appreciation method outlined in Part 1 (see the following exhibit). The theory is that concentrating on the bass lines of superior players can sharpen your perception of the music. Today's lesson is from another great bassist. It's Niels Henning Orsted-Pedersen in 1971 at the Cafe Monmartre in Copenhagen. Niels Jorgen Steen is the pianist, Jorn Elniff the drummer, Finn Ziegler the violinist.
NHP was 25 years old. He had already established himself as the bassist ...
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Artie Shaw: Making of a Box Set
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
I don't know about you but I've always been curious about how Mosaic Records remasters recordings for its box sets. A long-time fan of Mosaic's restorations and attention to detail, I favor the “Producer's Note" that appears at the back of each set's calendar-size liner-notes brochure. Written by Scott Wenzel, Mosaic's award-winning producer, the note often tosses around terms like “metal parts," “lacquer discs" and “second generation LPs." After listening to Mosaic's new Classic Artie Shaw Bluebird and Victor Sessions, ...
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Listen to the Bass Player: Part 1, Percy Heath
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
In the days when I was learning to truly listen, Red Kelly gave me a piece of valuable advice. He told me to close my eyes and in my mind isolate and concentrate on the bass player. He said that when I felt and understood what the bassist was doing, the rest of the music would begin to fall into place. It was a coincidence, of course, that Red was a bass player.
As an impoverished student, I had a ...
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Nicholas Payton has his kind of blue
Source:
Michael Ricci
Nicholas Payton has to be on the short list of the finest living jazz trumpeters. Early in his career, he was a protg of fellow New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis. But Payton has long since established himself as an esteemed artist in his own right, recording a string of strong albums including several for the legendary Verve label. Payton's most recent disc, last year's “Into the Blue" (Nonesuch), is among his best. Of particular interest is a splendid rendition of ...
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Musicians' Collective Harks Back to '70s Avant-Garde
Source:
Michael Ricci
The rainstorm raging outside Never Ending Books, a modest space on State Street, seemed to echo the sonic deconstruction taking place inside as the New Haven Improvisers Collective held its monthly workshop dedicated to breaking down music into its basic parts and building it up again on the fly. The workshop focused on melodic fragments, metric patterns and the like as the basis for group improvisations that, to the casual listener, might have seemed subversive. But the collective, which welcomed ...
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