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Bix Beiderbecke: Overrated?
The recent Rifftides item about the continuing medical needs of Bix Beiderbecke biographer Richard M. Sudhalter brought interesting comments about both men. You can read it and the comments here. The piece stimulated a correspondence with Paul Paolicelli, blog reader, fellow survivor of the news business and former lead trumpet player. Leaving out parts concerning unproved ...
Other Places: John Coltrane, Bud Shank
John Coltrane In the August 21 Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff tells of a New York second grade teacher, Christine Pasarella, who uses John Coltrane as a classroom role model in her work of drawing out the intelligence of her students. He reports Mrs. Pasarella saying that when she played Coltrane's recordings... “...the children ...
Recent Listening: Perez, Brookmeyer, Lundgren, Gardner
Rifftides World Headquarters has welcome summer visitors and resounds with telecasts of Olympics events. Nonetheless, the staff makes time for listening. We don't award medals, but here are brief impressions of four recent CDs that placed high with the judges. Danilo Perez, Across The Crystal Sea (EmArcy). Inevitably, this collaboration of the pianist with Claus Ogerman ...
Jazz and Film Animation: A Brief, Sketchy History
Film animation married to jazz improvisation goes back to the 1930s and the advent of sound films. This collaboration of the cartoon figure Betty Boop and the real Louis Armstrong is one of the most famous early examples. Social sensitivity was not a consideration.I n 1949, the art advanced--or at least changed--dramatically when two Canadians, ...
Other Places: Paul Bley Speaks
Thanks to Rifftides reader Brian Nation of the Vancouver, B.C., Jazz Society for directions to a transcribed conversation with Paul Bley. Bley was at the center of changes in jazz in the late l950s. The Canadian pianist has continued for half a century as an instigator of transformation. At the same time, he has been a ...
CD: Johnny Griffin and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis
Johnny Griffin & Lockjaw Davis, Live in Copenhagen (Storyville). The hard-charging tenor saxophonists worked in tandem for twenty-six years. This 1984 club date at the Montmarte club two years before Davis's death is typical of the unremitting swing and visceral excitement of their live appearances. The rhythm section is pianist Harry Pickens, bassist Curtis Lundy and ...
CD: Miles from India
Miles From India (Times Square). Producer Bob Belden wound up a monumental series of Miles Davis reissue box sets for Sony/Columbia, then he and fellow arranger Louiz Banks turned to interpreting the trumpeter's immense output of recordings after 1959. This two-CD set considers the intersection of Indian music with Davis's adventures in scales and modes from ...
DVD: Joe Zawinul
Joe Zawinul: A Musical Portrait (ArtsHaus Musik). This well crafted documentary offers generous helpings of Zawinul's music while outlining his life and philosophy. Zawinul's luxurious existence in Malibu during his final years ("I have everything I want in life") contrasts with a visit to his boyhood home in Vienna and his account of surviving an Allied bombing in 1944. ...
Herb Geller, Activist
At eighty, Herb Geller is playing alto saxophone even better than when he was a key jazz figure in the 1950s and '60s. He is performing not with the gravity of Brahmsian old age but with full vigor. Nor has he lost the force of his convictions, witness this political song for which he wrote words and ...
Rollins on Rollins
In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades... ...because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still ...
