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 drummer Kenny Washington, ...
More >
Joe Zawinul: A Musical Portrait (ArtHaus 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. The sequences featurin...
More >
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 music. In the interest of fairness, the Rifftides staff searched long and hard on the internet...
More >
A British company is releasing a two-CD package tracing Bix Beiderbecke's influence on musicians of his era. Proceeds from sale of the set will be devoted to medical care of Dick Sudhalter, a musical descendant of Beiderbecke and his greatest biographer. Sudhalter is in bad health with MSA (muscular system atrophy) and getting worse. He needs help. From the Jass Masters news release: The CD set...
More >
It is now called the JVC Jazz Festival, but it still takes place in Newport, Rhode Island. If the festival no longer has the jazz purity of its beginnings in the 1950s, at least it has survived. It continues to include major jazz artists among the tangential pop figures who attract the big crowds that pay the bills. In today's Boston Globe, Steve Greenlee summarizes the two days of Newport and ...
More >
--- - |- 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 be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could ...
More >
The Frishberg, Sullivan, Wellstood item in the next exhibit brought quick responses from two men who knew Wellstood well. The first was Ted O'Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster who produced a few Wellstood recordings.Wellstood was one of the brightest men I ever met, never mind how great a pianist he was. And great he was, and not afraid to play the way he did: as a stride/swing player in the bop ...
More >
Dick Wellstood has been on my mind. Maybe it's because I heard Dave Frishberg play the piano the other night at The Seasons. Frishberg was in concert singing his inimitable songs and accompanying himself, but he opened up plenty of space for piano solos. Before he became famous for performing his songs, Frishberg worked with Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Ben Webster, Jack Sheldon and Carmen McRae, among ...
More >
New: Torben Waldorff, Afterburn (ArtistShare). The Danish guitarist accomodates his early rock leanings to absorption with expansive jazz of the kind that thrives in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and is spreading around the world. Waldorff, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist-organist Sam Yahel are leaders among the articulate standard bearers of the movement. They play off one anot...
More >
In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I'm no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers's introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the reader along. Two excerpts:I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of con...
More >
Long before he won the Thelonious Monk Institute Composers Competition in 2000, Michael Weiss established himself as a pianist. Fresh out of Dallas in his early twenties, he was soon working with Jon Hendricks, Junior Cook, Charles McPherson and Lou Donaldson, among others. He went on to play with Art Farmer, George Coleman, Frank Wess, Slide Hampton, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Following ...
More >
Not long ago in a Recent Listening in Brief posting, I brushed by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra's new CD. Brevity by no means indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the latest recorded work of that remarkable institution. Will Friedwald, the jazz critic of The New York Sun, is another VJO enthusiast. He attended the band's recent performance at New York's 92nd Street Y in the summer concert series ov...
More >
Our patience will achieve more than our force. -- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin; Ay, there, look grim as hell! -- Shakespeare, Othello Patience and fortitude,Patience and fortitude,Patience and fortitude,And things will come your way. -- Patience and Fortitude, lyrics by Johnny Mercer~~
More >
Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist whose technical command set standards for his instrument and who refused to compromise his art, died today at his home in the village of Mauprevoir in France. From Ben Ratliff's obituary of Griffin in today's New York Times:His height -- around five feet five -- earned him the nickname "The Little Giant"; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as "The Fast...
More >
Lately, I've been missing Tom Talbert. I went into the archive to see what Rifftides had to say about him following his death a little more than three years ago. Here is one paragraph of the remembrance:Tom died on Saturday, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast bef...
More >
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today--Aaron CoplandWell, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and t...
More >
In a 1995 Jazz Times review of a Sylvia Syms CD, I wrote:Sylvia Syms had a vibrato like a telephone wire in a breeze. She sometimes slid around both sides of a note before she settled on it. She often added the syllable "uh" to the end of a word ("ridin' on the moon-uh"). She could pounce on a consonant and ignore the vowel next door. Some of her power notes were pure brass and there were momen...
More >
McFarlandIn the course of writing about Gloria Cheng's new CD (in the next exhibit), I mentioned Gary McFarland's collaboration with Bill Evans, a basic repertoire item in every serious CD collection of twentieth century music. Bill Kirchner includes it in his survey of a dozen essential tracks from a variety of McFarland's and others' recordings. Kirchner's preamble places in perspective this ...
More >
Warne Marsh & Kenny Drew In Copenhagen (Storyville). Recorded in 1980, Marsh--a tenor sax master of subtlety and liquid imagination--plays in a quartet with Drew, one of the brightest graduates of Bud Powell's college of bebop piano knowledge. Marsh has a few "oops" moments in note choices, but hearing him think his way out of them is part of the fun. This CD has one of Marsh's most stimulatin...
More >
What is this? This page is an automated listing of all the articles published by Riff Tides. Check the articles out and visit the the Riff Tides site.
© 2006-2009 Mog Inc. All Rights Reserved
