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Bill Evans, 1929-1980
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Bill Evans died 35 years ago today at the age of 51. Long before everybody dug him, his producer, Orrin Keepnews, titled a 1958 album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. The cover had autographed endorsements from Miles Davis, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal and Cannonball Adderley. “Bill Evans has rare originality and taste,” Adderley wrote, “and the even rarer ability to make his conception of a number seem the definitive way to play it.” Adderley was perceptive and the album title was ...
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DeFranco & Gibbs: Fast And Flexible
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
One of the precepts that old jazz pros have taught young musicians for years is that it’s vital to be able to play any piece of music in any key at any tempo. Here’s an example. It’s from the days a quarter of a century ago when vibraharpist Terry Gibbs and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco teamed up and toured extensively. Their rhythm section at a club called the Cliff Side in Yokohama, Japan, in 1991 was Larry Novak, piano; Herb Ellis, ...
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Ben Wendel - The Seasons Project: August with Mark Turner + NPR + Concerts + ACT II
Source:
Jason Byrne, Red Cat Publicity
Dear Friends, Colleagues, Journalists, DJs & PDs, Ben Wendel is incredibly happy to announce the next installment of his video art project, The Seasons. Previous guests on The Seasons include Julian Lage, Shai Maestro, Matt Brewer, Joshua Redman and others. This month features a duet with the great saxophonist and composer, Mark Turner, “someone who has greatly influenced me and countless other musicians", commented Wendel. For those that know Mark's playing, this duet ended up being directly influenced by his ...
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Remembering Kenny Drew
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Had he lived, pianist Kenny Drew would have celebrated his 87th birthday today. Drew first recorded with trumpeter Howard McGhee in 1950, when he was 22. He went on to play and record with many of the leading artists in jazz, including Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Buddy DeFranco, Dinah Washington, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Johnny Griffin and Buddy Rich. Drew settled in Paris in 1961 and moved to Copenhagen three years later, where he became a ...
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Weekend Extra: The MJQ And “Django”
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
One of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s signature pieces was “Django,” John Lewis’s homage to DjangoReinhardt (1910-1953). Reinhardt’s guitar playing reflected his upbringing in Gypsy communities in France and in Belgium, where he was born, and he became one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. Lewis captured much of the essence of Reinhardt’s music in a tune that became a modern jazz standard recorded not only by the MJQ but also by dozens of musicians including Ray Brown, Herbie ...
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CT, Zoot And Friends In New Orleans, 1969
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
As mentioned in Rifftides from time to time, many who attended or played in the original New Orleans Jazz Festival remember it as an example of what a jazz festival can be. The 1968 and 1969 editions of JazzFest were intimate compared with what later became the Jazz And Heritage Festival, a massive Crescent City party in which jazz is often more evident in the name than in the music. Six of the people who made the ’69 festival memorable ...
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Video History of the Phonograph
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
It's video Friday! Today, one of the documentaries in the March of Time newsreel series that was shown in movie theaters from 1935 to 1951. This one is called In the Groove: The History of the Phonograph Industry (1949), which tracks the dramatic evolution of recording technology. The only error I caught is that the American Federation of Musicians didn't win a royalty from the recording industry in 1942, as the narrator states, but did so in 1944, when all ...
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Jimmy Jones Trio: 1954
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Jimmy Jones was an in-demand arranger and pianist throughout the 1950s and '60s, working with most leading jazz vocalists and soloists of the era. If you go into Tom Lord's Jazz Discography, you'll find Jones on 307 sessions. But if you modify your search, screened just for Jones's leadership dates, you'll find that the number is dramatically reduced to eight. In truth, there were only seven, since the tracks for Atlantic in 1957 were never issued. Among these seven, the ...
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