Fred Kaplan Blog

Nellie McKay does Doris Day Posted Thu Nov 19, 2009, 2:13 PM ET

Nellie McKay’s Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve, CD and LP) is the unlikeliest delight of the year. Who’d have thought that the snarkmistress of Get Away from Me (her 2004 debut double-album, with its “Explicit Lyrics” label, downtown cool, and sharp-wit irony, to say nothing of the title’s savage slash at the then-raging darling, Norah Jones) could produce such gentle covers of hits once sung by the queen of wholesomeness?

And yet that’s what this is. Yes, there’s a whimsy to the arrangements (nobody these days could sing the lyrics to “Send Me No Flowers” straight-faced), but there’s no winking or nudging. McKay clearly has a feel, and a love, for these songs and the sensibility they reflect.

A few weeks ago, my friend and Stereophile colleague Michael Fremer went to a Jazz At Lincoln Center “listening party,” marking the album’s release, and I think it’s fair to say we were both a bit smitten by her charms. With her wavy blonde hair, broad smile, and polite shyness (whether real or feigned), she seemed a throwback to the ‘30s or ‘40s, a character that Carole Lombard might have played in a screwball comedy.

Besides talking about the album, she sang a couple of the tunes live, accompanying herself on a ukulele—such a pure, lovely voice. She clearly has the chops for this sort of music.

The album’s mix churns her voice through a weird, though slight processing (which, as she clearly displayed at the party, was entirely unnecessary). Still, her singing is so strong, the effect detracts little, and the engineering otherwise (by the estimable James Farber) is impressive and palpable. (The CD and LP were both mastered from a digital file; the latter sounds better than the former but not by much.)

Besides singing, McKay, who’s 27, co-produced the album (with her mother, actress Robin Pappas), arranged all but two of the 13 tracks, and plays eight instruments, usually a few of them (overdubbed, of course) at once. In some ways, the most swaying tunes are those where she plays all the instruments on the track: piano, organ, bells, and tambora on “The Very Thought of You,” and ukulele, bells, and mellotron on “Send Me No Flowers.”

Very nice with brandy, or hot chocolate, on a cold winter night.

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Truth + Beauty + Jazz = Herman Leonard Posted Sat Oct 31, 2009, 2:59 PM ET

Gracing the 5th floor lobby of Jazz At Lincoln Center for another few months is an exhibition of the great photographer Herman Leonard, whose images of jazz musicians at work deserve the overused term “iconic.”

At recording sessions, nightclub gigs, on stage, backstage, between cuts, or in the heat of the moment, Leonard captured the spirit, joy, and intensity of the music and its whole culture more evocatively and empathically than anyone else.

His classic work comes from the late 1940s and ‘50s, featuring the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan. But his later shots are also compelling, especially the chiaroscuro portraits of Miles Davis.

Leonard, who is 86 and still very active, has said his aim is “to tell the truth but to tell it in terms of beauty,” and his photographs—which are as collectable as great paintings or other artists’ limited-edition prints—are works of stunning beauty: the warm pool of light against the silky black backdrops, the texture of a jacket, the glow of a horn, the character of these men and women caught spontaneously at the decisive moment. Imagine a letter-day Rembrandt, armed with a camera and a love for jazz, and you have some idea of Herman Leonard.

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John Surman's Brewster's Rooster Posted Sat Oct 31, 2009, 2:35 PM ET

John Surman, a saxophonist of jazz, folk, church, and avant-garde influences, has been a longtime denizen in the ECM stable without gaining much renown. When he recently played at a New York club, leading a rhythm section of guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, he acknowledged to the crowd that he was the only player who needed introducing.

The same band plays on Surman’s latest CD, Brewster’s Rooster, and it’s the ensemble mix that makes it such a diverting pleasure. On the album’s best tracks, including the opener, “Slanted Sky,” Surman (on soprano sax) and Abercrombie exchange an engaging melody of such wispy moodiness, it almost borders on New Age, except that Gress takes sharp corners in his bass walks, highlighting the slight strands of dissonance while anchoring the beat, and DeJohnette propels things forward with African rhythms in double or triple time.

The contrasts fly out at crisscrossing angles, yet they’re gripped and contained by some force of gravity, which stems entirely (and somewhat mysteriously) by the musicians’ mastery at interplay.

The only weak tracks are those two or three (out of nine) where Surman plunges into the fray, rather than tracing orbits around it; they’re not bad, just routine.

The sound, by Joe Ferla, one of the great jazz recording engineers, is exquisite and palpable.

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Keith Jarrett's Masterful Testament Posted Wed Oct 14, 2009, 5:00 PM ET

Keith Jarrett’s Paris/London: Testament (on the ECM label), a three-CD set consisting of two live solo concerts, is a stunning album, a career peak.

I’ve seen Jarrett play solo at Carnegie Hall twice in the past few years and my jaw dropped at both. (Both concerts were recorded; one was released as an album in 2006, which I listed as the second-best of that year, topped only by Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar.) But those New York dates were nothing compared to what Jarrett ekes from the keyboard here.

All of the music is totally improvised, not in the sense of typical jazz improvisations, which take off from a standard song or theme. No, Jarrett sits at the piano and invents something entirely from scratch, extends it for a while, stops, then invents something else entirely from scratch, then does it again, and again, and again.

A couple decades ago, Jarrett would spin rhapsodic with these improvisations, for an hour or more. Lately, he’s tightened up, treating them as pieces of a suite. Of the 20 tracks on these three discs, only five last longer (and, even then, they’re just a little bit longer) than 10 minutes. They’re so tight, you’d think they were well-wrought compositions.

It must be exhausting to do this.

Disc 1, recorded at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on Nov. 26 of last year, is riveting: dense tone clusters, stormy sheets of sound, like something out of late Debussy, but with a knife-sharp blues edge. The fever is so pitched that when he segues into an elegy toward the end of the concert, it feels like some barrier has been broken; the effect is heroic.

The concert on Discs 2 and 3, laid down just five days later at the Royal Festival Hall in London, is structured more like the other Jarrett solo concerts I’ve seen, alternating between abstract constructions and stirring ballads. But he’s digging deeper into his melodies, stretching wider in his harmonies, at once anchoring and altering the rhythms with more swing and soul than usual. The middle of the concert, from the start of Disc 3, weighs down a bit, but he bursts free of the repetition with a gospel cadence that’s rollicking in its intensity.

It brings down the house.

Martin Pearson’s engineering is, as always, superb, capturing the piano’s percussive glow; the bass notes grumble clearly, and the pedal action is palpable.

P.S. Yes, Keith hums and moans now and then, and it can be distracting. But if he really needs these eruptions to summon such depths of music, then I'd say the trade-off is worth it.

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Black Saint, Soul Note, and DIW Posted Fri Oct 9, 2009, 5:04 PM ET

Watching Bobby Bradford and David Murray on the bandstand together at the Jazz Standard Saturday night (see my last blog entry) inspired me to take another listen to the only CD that paired them together, Death of a Sideman, recorded in 1991 under Murray’s name but featuring nothing but Bradford compositions, eight tracks’ worth.

The band on the disc was even more amazing than the one at the Standard: Murray on tenor sax and Bradford on cornet, joined by Fred Hopkins on bass, Ed Blackwell on drums, and, on a few tracks, Dave Burrell on piano. Hopkins was one of the most agile bassists of the era. Blackwell was one of the half-dozen greatest jazz drummers of the last half-century, slapping every strand of jazz tradition onto the trapset (African rhythms, New Orleans dance, gutbucket blues, polyrhythmic bebop, soulful swing) and pushing it all forward.

I hadn’t heard the disc for several years, but don’t ask me why because it turns out to be one of Murray’s best: a mix of minor-key melancholy, Monk riffs that shift a bit more off-centered than Monk, and free improvisation that never descends into mere howling.

It was one of several albums that Murray made in 1991, released either on the Italian label Black Saint or the Japanese label DIW. (Death of a Sideman was on DIW.) Both labels are long out of print, though many of their titles are available as MP3s.

Black Saint (along with Soul Note, another Italian label owned by the same proprietor, Giovanni Bonandrini) was the hip jazz label from the late 1970s through the early ‘90s, an era when the most creative avant-gardists were exploring the music’s roots—rediscovering the appeal of beauty, wit, and swing—and sifting them through their own individual sounds.

Artists included Murray, Blackwell, the World Saxophone Quartet, Don Pullen, George Adams, Cassandra Wilson, Muhal Richard Abrams, Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Hill, Paul Bley, Billy Bang, Lester Bowie, Jaki Byard, Chico Freeman, Dewey Redman, Sam Rivers, Max roach, George Russell, Archie Shepp, and Sun Ra, to name a few.

Black Saint and Soul Note were to the jazz of that era what Blue Note and Impulse! were to theirs. Jazz fans would buy the latest releases on the reputation of the label alone, knowing they’d hear music that was adventurous but (for the most part) accessible, virtuosic with a beat, soaring to the stars but tied to the ground. And a lot of those albums also sounded very good. (Blue Note and Impulse!, it should be noted, were small indie labels in their heyday, too.)

This got me to thinking: Some audiophile-reissue house should put out the best Black Saints and Soul Notes, and maybe DIWs too, on 180-gram vinyl (and while I’m dreaming, it’d be nice if they were mastered at 45 rpm).

How many more audiophile pressings of Blue Train and Way Out West do we need? There are quite a few Blue Note reissues selling for $50 a pop (at 45 rpm or otherwise) that, quite frankly, we don’t need at all, on sonic or musical grounds.

A Black Saint/Soul Note LP-reissue series would be a major contribution, the source of deep joy to modern-jazz-loving audiophiles. I would be happy to donate my services to drawing up a list of priorities. Classic Records, Speakers Corner Records, Cisco Records, Acoustic Sounds—you guys listening?

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Bobby Bradford (continued) Posted Thu Oct 8, 2009, 2:11 PM ET

As I was saying a few days ago, Bobby Bradford’s rare appearance at the Jazz Standard last Saturday was one of the most bracing sets I’ve seen in a long time. In the early-to-mid ‘90s, New Yorkers could go hear this sort of jazz—exuberant, free, but highly disciplined music—almost every night at the Knitting Factory. Just about everyone in Bradford’s band on Saturday was a regular at “the Knit” in its heyday—David Murray on tenor sax, Marty Ehrlich on alto, Mark Dresser on bass, Andrew Cyrille on drums: an extraordinary band.

Each of these players knows how to improvise on a theme in wildly flighty excursions without ever quite snapping the tether to that theme. What was remarkable about Saturday’s set was that each player followed his own flight path yet they all meshed wondrously in ensemble. This is what “free jazz,” at its finest, is all about, not just blowing whatever comes into your head (as some of its practitioners seem to think).

Bradford, who plays trumpet, is too little known, perhaps because he lives and teaches in L.A. In the early ‘60s, he briefly replaced Don Cherry in Ornette Coleman’s quartet and later played on Coleman’s album Science Fiction. (I’m told that Ornette showed up at the Standard for the second set Saturday to watch his old friend in action.) Bradford is 75 now, and, though his tone isn’t the clarion call it once was, his knack for brooding minor-key harmonies, his romantic sway with a ballad, and his surefooted sense of staggered time are all undiminished.

Murray, who was Bradford’s student at Ponoma College in the ‘70s, plays New York too infrequently these days as well, having moved to Paris a dozen years ago. He still blows like Ben Webster cycled through Albert Ayler, and taps into the rhythms of the earth.

Ehrlich soaked up the heat and bounced it back with an exuberance I’ve rarely heard from him. Dresser, who has played with Bradford off and on for nearly as long, plucked the bass with hair-raising focus and energy; his solos were turbulent one-man call-and- response sessions. Cyrille, a master of polyrhythms, egged everyone on while tossing out anchors to buoy up every stormy current.

When you put players of this caliber together, they bring out the best in themselves and one another. Somebody, record this band!

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Heads Up on Bobby Bradford Posted Sat Oct 3, 2009, 10:50 PM ET

Just back from seeing the Bobby Bradford Quintet, featuring David Murray, one highlight among many of the Dave Douglas-curated New Trumpet Music Festival at the Jazz Standard in New York City. One of the most invigorating sets of jazz I've seen in a long time, the sort of exuberant, "free" but highly disciplined music that the city heard plenty of in the 1980s through mid-'90s but rarely anymore. More about that later. Meanwhile, the quintet expands to an octet tomorrow (Sunday, Oct 4). I can't make it, but if you can, get tickets now!

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Ben Webster & Associates Posted Tue Sep 29, 2009, 12:11 PM ET

Ben Webster and Associates is one of the loveliest albums put out in the past couple years by Speakers Corner Records, the German-based audiophile reissue house. (Its LPs are distributed in the U.S. by Chad Kassem’s Acoustic Sounds.) Recorded in 1959 on the Verve label, it features Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Budd Johnson on tenor saxophones; Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Ray Brown, bass; Jimmy Jones, piano; Leslie Spann, guitar; Jo Jones, drums.

I’m tempted to leave it at that. Does anything more really need to be said?

The album’s highlights are the ballads: Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone,” which takes up the entire first side, and Styne & Cohn’s “Time After Time.” The first thing that strikes you is Webster’s tone: at once sweet and muscular, limber and weighty. The next is how much these guys can swing while playing so slow. Ray Brown sometimes lags behind with his bass line, yet in a way that heightens the swing, or maybe he’s just sharpening it with tension. (Many bass players who came through Duke’s band, as Brown did, developed this knack.)

Like many Verve albums of the day, the jacket doesn’t credit the engineer, but the sound is both creamy and sharp. That is, you hear the syrupy smoothness of the saxophones but also the bright brass of the trumpet and the all the smacks and sizzle of the drumkit.

It’s not quite as marvelous, musically or sonically, as a similar album put out by Columbia three years later, Ben Webster & “Sweets” Edison, remastered by Mike Hobson’s Classic Records. But it’s right up there.

Ben Webster and Associates also sports an eye-popping historical artifact in the liner notes, written by Leonard Feather, one of the top (if establishmentarian) jazz critics of the day. Toward the end of the notes, he writes:

“After listening to this album, I made a mental note to send a copy…to a young tenor player whom I heard at Birdland the other evening. He was making up to 32 notes per measure with a stovepipe tone, absolutely no relationship to the harmonic structure of the pieces…and a complete rejection of emotion coupled with an evident desire to implant out-and-out ugliness as the mood of the moment… If he were willing to learn, he could gain more out of a study of eight measures of Ben, or Bean, or Budd, than I gained from eight minutes of listening to his tortured mind at work.”

Feather, of course, was referring to John Coltrane—and in 1959, two years before Trane and his sideman Eric Dolpy truly shocked the jazz world at the Village Vanguard. Trane circa ’59 is now regarded as mainstream modern jazz at its peak—and accessible besides. The culture wars, it seems, have always been with us, in one guise or another. The lesson of this album, in the greatness of the music and the crankiness of the liner notes, is that quality tends to win out and both poles converge. Ben Webster and Associates and Giant Steps are both great albums. For the Leonard Feathers of the world, it only takes a little time to figure that out.

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Ornette at Lincoln Center Posted Sun Sep 27, 2009, 2:25 PM ET

Ornette Coleman shuffled onto the stage of Jazz At Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater Saturday night, and that was remarkable enough. JALC, Wynton Marsalis’ house of jazz, is typed as a conservative institution—to some, the antithesis of the music’s inherently progressive nature—yet here was the quintessential avant-gardist, making his debut appearance in the lavish concert hall on the opening night of its 2009-10 season.

Ornette is in his 80th year, JALC is in its 23rd. Has Ornette become a part of the establishment, or has the establishment loosened its admission policies?

A bit of both. Coleman did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize for music a few years back. Around the same time, JALC sponsored a double bill of Cecil Taylor’s trio and John Zorn’s Masada; Dave Douglas, long typecast as the anti-Marsalis, opened for Wynton’s sextet at the Rose Theater that season, too.

The jazz chapter of the ‘90s culture wars—Uptown vs. Downtown (a.k.a. Lincoln Center vs. the Knitting Factory, or the high-cover clubs vs. the lofts)—has pretty much ground to a halt over the course of this decade, as aesthetic boundaries and hierarchies have melted away generally in the postmodern haze.

Certainly the crowning of Ornette Coleman has come about through no compromise on his part. The singular, self-made alto saxophonist, composer and musical pioneer who flipped the jazz world 50 years ago, with The Shape of Jazz to Come, is the same man who blew his horn at the Rose Theater Saturday night. We’re the ones who have come around. As a friend said after the last Ornette concert in New York, in the spring of last year, “Why was his music ever controversial?”

Saturday night’s concert was a wonder, as his concerts usually are. His tone has taken on a burnished glow with age—it’s simply gorgeous—yet his sense of risk and adventure remains. His quartet, meanwhile, continues to evolve.

Denardo Coleman, his son, has long been a drummer of dazzling technique, agile at moving in and out of many rhythms, but last night he also revealed a mastery of dynamic control; he could play with mounting fury, yet quietly.

Tony Falanga on upright bass just gets more head-shakingly remarkable, not just keeping time and walking the bassline but carving out new paths, crafting new clocks, yet always hitting the beat.

Al McDowell, who plays electric bass guitar, has finally found a role for himself: sometimes strumming like a guitar, sometimes doubling on the melody line, sometimes echoing it, or tracing a countermelody. In short, he’s playing a role similar to what Don Cherry played on trumpet in the original Coleman band. The effect is to splash some new colors on the canvas. For instance, “Lonely Woman,” Coleman’s anthem, which the band played as an encore, took on a noir feel, a racy mystery, missing from previous versions.

That’s another thing about Ornette Coleman. He appears so infrequently that he could play the same solos at each gig and few would complain. But he’s still improvising, still trying untapped combinations, exploring unpaved routes—and finding his way, without fail, every time.

This band swings. I’ve heard Coleman play these songs many times, but I’ve never heard them swing this much. “Turnaround” is another song he plays at every concert; it dates back to 1958, and he started reprising it with his Sound Grammar album a few years ago. It’s a very bluesy song, but the blues had a groove that’s never shimmied quite so deeply.

One final word: the Rose Theater may be the best concert hall in New York City--visually elegant and sonically pristine. I've seen various kinds of music there--classical, chamber, jazz of all sorts--and it always sounds clean and clear. At Ornettte's show, the two basses were far more distinct than I've heard them sound when the band's played at Carnegie and Town Hall (neither of which is really cut out for this kind of music), and the balance between both and the drums is remarkably even. The only shortcoming, and it's minor, is that for some of the songs Ornette sat on a stool, putting him a bit below the mikes than the sound engineers had planned, and, while he didn't sound at all "buried" in the mix, his horn wasn't quite as prominent as it should have been. Again, a slight deficiency. Otherwise, in terms of sound as well as music, a joy.

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Motian-Lovano-Frisell Posted Wed Sep 2, 2009, 12:15 PM ET

The trio of Paul Motian, Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell finishes a two-week gig at the Village Vanguard this Sunday, and if you’re in the New York area, you should drop in (though call ahead for tickets, as nearly every set, including the one I saw last night, has been packed). Here are three of the most creative jazz musicians around, each playing at the top of his game, a combination that doesn’t always make for the most coherent combos (think of the many “all-star bands” of yore that amounted to little more than blowing contests), but this trio is that rare thing, a truly equilateral triangle: no player consistently dominate, all parts are equal.

But what makes this trio so riveting is that the music swings, rocks, sizzles, simmers—and I don’t understand idea how the contraption holds together; I can only marvel at the feat, sit back, and take it in.

Lovano blows the tenor sax with a warm, husky tone, sometimes as a bop balladeer, sometimes in Coltrane sheets of sound. (Lovano is shaping up to be the heir to Sonny Rollins.) Frisell plucks his twangy electric guitar, occasionally strums slightly off-centered chords, more often carves out single-line counterpoint or beams atmospheric warbling. Motian (who’s 78 but could pass for 60 and sounds younger still) klook-a-mops and shimmer-shammers the drumkit, constantly shifting rhythm and tempo; his lines seem to have almost no connection to what the other players are doing, yet the more you listen, the more you realize that he’s weaving the web that makes the sounds whole.

I’ve heard Motian many times, with many bands, over the years; he pulls this rabbit out of a hat nearly every time; and I don’t see how he does it. I once asked Frank Kimbrough, an excellent pianist who’s played with him a few times, what Motian is doing. Kimbrough, who’s normally eloquent on such matters, replied, “I don’t know, man, it’s magic.”

For those unable to make the Vanguard sets, immerse yourself in Time and Time Again, the trio’s enchanting 2007 album on ECM. Also check out Lovano’s new albums, Folk Art and (as a sideman to Steve Kuhn) Mostly Coltrane (on Blue Note and ECM respectively), and Frisell’s duet masterpiece with Jim Hall, Hemispheres (on Artistshare), all of which I’ve written about in this space.

Frisell also has a brand new CD, Disfarmer (on Nonesuch), a quartet album—with fellow guitarist Greg Leisz, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and bassist Viktor Krauss—featuring original tunes inspired by the haunting pictures of rural Americans taken in the 1930s and ‘40s by the photographer known as Disfarmer. The music is more folk and country than jazz; it’s as evocative in its way as Erik Friedlander’s Block Ice & Propane another hybrid, inspired by memories of going on summertime family car rides across the country with his father, the photographer Lee Friedlander. And that's saying a great deal.

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Happy Kind of Blue Day! Posted Mon Aug 17, 2009, 9:49 AM ET

On August 17, 1959—50 years ago exactly—Columbia Records released Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which became not only the best-selling jazz album of all time but also one of the best jazz albums, period, the spearhead of the “modal” revolution.

For an elaboration of why Kind of Blue is such a great and revolutionary recording, see my column in Slate today (with illustrative sound clips included).

But for you readers of Stereophile blogs, most of whom know a lot about that sort of thing anyway, let’s deal with the important question: which LP and CD pressings of this album are the best-sounding? (And, as engineered by the shamefully unsung Fred Plaut, this is one of the best-sounding jazz albums as well.)

The version that I’m most prone to put on the ’table (and I say this as someone who has all of them) is the four-disc, 45rpm LP reissue by Classic Records. (It’s four discs because each slab of vinyl has only one side with grooves implanted; the other side is blank, which is to say flat, to minimize groove resonance against the platter. Yes, sounds wonky, but it does have an effect.) Anyway, this is the one: the instruments sound so there, so 3D; the tonal colors are just right; Paul Chambers’ bass is plucky, Jimmy Cobb’s drums sizzly, and John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Miles Davis sound blissfully like themselves. (Bill Evans’ piano falls a bit short of the highest fidelity, but it sounds much better here than on other pressings.)

Classic also put out a number of 33rpm reissues of Kind of Blue, and they too sound excellent, if not quite as jaw-dropping.

As for original pressings, if you can find them in good condition, the original (with the center label illustrated with six eyes—hence the collectors’ designation “six-eyes” pressing) is terrific, though the Classic 45 is at least as good in every category, often better, except for the bass, where the original is a bit more tuneful.

Columbia’s second-pressing LP, which says “360 Sound” on the label, is just a couple notches below the original. Later pressings from the ‘70s, which have no such fancy work on the label (and which have a different serial number, beginning with “PC” instead of the original “CS”), are not worth getting: the music’s still great, but the sound is flat, one dimensional, less involving.

Last year, in celebration of the then-impending 50th anniversary, Sony Legacy (which long ago took over Columbia) put out a deluxe box-set, which included, among other things, a newly mastered blue-colored LP. The folks at Sony say they used the Classic pressings as a sound check, but I’d like to know what kind of playback gear they used. It sounds much like the 1970s reissue.

Kind of Blue has a checkered history on CD. Do not get the early ones; they sound bad. A startling breakthrough came in the late 1980s, when Sony’s engineers discovered an error in the original recordings. It turned out that the tape-recorder used on that fateful day at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio was running a quarter-tone slow, meaning the playback was a quarter-tone fast. The engineers for this gold CD dug up a backup tape, which ran at the right speed; the gold CD was mastered from it; and what do you know, the correction made a real difference; the music sounded a bit hip-groovingly bluesier still.

All subsequent CDs (and all of Classic’s LP reissues, which came a bit later) incorporated this speed adjustment. But caution: Do not get Sony’s SACD of this album, a very early stab at the technology, which was often used as a demo disc by people who tried to argue that SACDs were lousy.

The next CD, which came out in 1999 and was mastered on the three-channel vacuum-tube equipment used in the actual recording, sounded much better, though, for reasons that have never been explained, it includes an unusual amount of tape hiss.

The newest CD, a double-disc 50th-anniversary edition, removes the hiss, but the music has been stripped of a smidgen of high frequencies as well. You’ll notice this shortfall only on really excellent hi-fi systems. The bonus CD consists of other recordings by the same sextet, some live, most out of print; the sound is superb, and the music much worth having.

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George Russell, R.I.P. Posted Tue Jul 28, 2009, 9:04 PM ET

George Russell died today, at the age of 86, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and if you’ve never heard of him, all the deeper pity.

Russell was one of the great unsung heroes of modern jazz. In this summer when many are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, it is worth noting that there would have been no such album—the art of jazz might have languished in post-Parker malaise for a few years longer—had there been no George Russell.

Born in Cincinnati, a prodigy on piano and drums, he moved to New York in the late 1940s, wrote “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” (the pioneering work of Afro-Cuban jazz) for Dizzy Gillespie, and joined a coterie of composers—most notably Gil Evans, John Lewis, and Gerry Mulligan—pushing the music in more inventive directions.

Soon after, Russell contracted pneumonia and spent over a year at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the Bronx, where a nurse showed him a piano in a library that almost nobody used. Friends brought him musical theory books, and every day he fiddled with new combinations of chords and scales. Finally, he hit upon a whole new way of playing jazz—improvising not on chord changes, as Gillespie and Charlie Parker had done in the bebop revolution of a decade earlier, but on scales, specifically church modes that hadn’t been explored by anyone in over a century.

The distinction might sound academic, but it was profound. When a bebop musician improvises, the chord changes serve as a compass; they point the directions to the next bar or the next phrase. The chords follow a particular pattern; you knew what the next chord would be. Playing blues, you also knew that this sequence of chord changes would be finished in 12 bars, and then you’d either end your solo or start over again. The best musicians took flighty excursions on these solos, but the chord structure determined or limited which notes they could play and for how long.

With Russell’s theory, the compass was thrown out the window, or its needle was sent spinning in multiple directions. You could play the notes of the chord, or any note along its scale, and you could play on that scale for as long as you wanted. As Russell put it in his book, The Lydian Chromatic concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation, “The concept provides the possibilities. It is for the musicians to sing his own song, really, without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord.”

Miles Davis was a friend of Russell’s and one of the first to grasp his theory’s implications. “When you go this way,” Davis explained in a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff, “you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes, and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are… I think a movement in jazz is beginning, away from the conventional string of chords and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.”

Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, would be the perfect expression of this concept—and the exemplar for a new generation of jazz musicians seeking freer ways of playing music (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

Russell led some great albums of his own: Jazz Workshop with Bill Evans (whom he introduced to Miles Davis—another prerequisite to the wondrous novelty of Kind of Blue), Ezz-thetic with Eric Dolphy, and New York, New York with Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Max Roach, and John Coltrane. All are very much worth checking out.

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Charlie Haden Duos Posted Fri Jul 24, 2009, 1:00 AM ET

Charlie Haden, the world’s most distinctive and enticing bass player, seems to have adopted a new tradition. It started as a special occasion, a dozen years ago, in celebration of his 60th birthday, when he played a week of duets at the Blue Note jazz club in New York, each night with a different pianist. He repeated the experiment on his 70th, and this week he’s doing it again, just short of his 72nd, not a round number, which leads me to suspect he’s doing it—and may do it again, semi-regularly—simply because it’s so thrilling, so fun.

The duet is, in a sense, jazz at its purest—group interaction in its most stripped-down form—but also its hardest: there’s no place for the players to hide, no moment when they can sit back and coast; they have to stick to the structure, but they also have to improve constantly, or else they bog down in cliché.

Haden is ideally suited for this format, because he’s all but incapable of cliché. He broke through the jazz world 50 years ago, almost to the date, as the bassist in Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, which created a whole new way of playing jazz—improvisation untethered from chord changes or set rhythms yet sounding beautiful all the same—and he’s treated music as an adventure and a quest ever since.

Ultimately he’s a romantic, a reveler in ballads and waltzes and rhapsodies. He plucks the bass with a surefooted rhythm (there’s no one who can stretch rhythm yet stay so propulsive) and a big, warm tone.

Sometimes he’ll sound out the chord, sometimes a variation on the scale, sometimes a tone cluster or a single note matching the mood that the music makes him feel; almost always, his choices sound right, almost inevitable, even when they’re a total departure from convention. There are few jazz musicians who immerse themselves so deeply in the moment yet stay so fixed both on the song and on his bandmates.

I went to the early set Tuesday, where he played duets with Ethan Iverson, best known as the pianist for The Bad Plus but a stirring, versatile pianist in his own right. He knows Haden’s music supremely well. They played a fair number of be-bop tunes, including some obscure ones (for instance, “Wahoo,” a variation on “Perdido” that Charlie Parker played on, as far as I can tell, one album), and the interplay was uncanny, magical even when it was low-key.

I missed Wednesday night’s sets with Haden’s contemporary, Steve Kuhn, whose latest album, Mostly Coltrane, I raved about in this space not long ago. Thursday and Friday, he plays with Kenny Barron, one of the most elegant balladeers around. Saturday, he goes at it with Paul Bley, the still-innovative pianist who led the first band that Haden played with out in L.A. in ’57-58. Sunday he closes with Bill Charlap; standards will no doubt be on the menu.

If you can’t make it to the Blue Note, sit home and listen to Night and the City, a duet album that Haden and Barron recorded at the Iridium in 1996: a lovely, noir-ish affair at once haunting and brisk. Or The Montreal Tapes: Charlie Haden, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, the most riveting of seven volumes of mainly duet and trio recordings Haden laid down at the 1989 Montreal Jazz Festival. Or Steal Away, a gorgeous set of gospel tunes that Haden recorded with Hank Jones. Or The Golden Number, his ‘70s album of duets with Hampton Hawes, Archie Shepp, and Don Cherry.

Haden is also something of an audiophile (he owns a Naim high-end system), and all these recordings are satisfying sonically, too.

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Steve Kuhn's Mostly Coltrane Posted Fri Jul 10, 2009, 10:29 AM ET

Steve Kuhn’s new CD, Mostly Coltrane (on the ECM label), has no business working, but it does, for the most part really well.

Trane-tribute albums are risky enough; most of them inspire only the desire to spin the originals. Kuhn at least has some bona fides, having played piano in a quartet that Coltrane led in the first few months of 1960 before forming the “classic quartet” that consisted of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones (or, as an occasional sub on drums, Roy Haynes).

The album’s most compelling tunes are those that Kuhn played with Coltrane himself, most of them ballads—“Central Park West,” “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” “I Want to Talk About You”—and they possess a spirit at once gentler but no less urgent than the versions Trane wound up recording. Kuhn doesn’t pound out block chords, as Tyner did, or bebop riffs, as Tommy Flanagan did during his brief stint in the band. Rather, he coaxes tone clusters and colors, a bit reminiscent of how Bill Evans backed Trane when they were both in Miles Davis’ late-‘50s sextet, though harder-edged.

Joe Lovano plays the tenor sax, another bit of derring-do, and he’s in top form, his brusque tone a fine fit for this music. His cover of the opening tune, “Welcome,” is gorgeous, and on “Central Park West,” he’s exceeded only by David Murray’s rendition on his out-of-print 1994 album, Saxmen. Joey Baron, on drums, may pull off the most eye-widening feat: beating the polyrhythms like Jones and spreading the rhythm outward like Haynes. How does he do that? Bassist David Finck, a longtime Kuhn sideman, holds down the fort with firm flair.

Only on the album’s last few tracks, which come mainly from Coltrane’s late-‘60s era, does the spirit sag. Trane was going farther out into interstellar space, and these tunes may need higher-energy backup. Otherwise, it’s a riveting album, and James Farber’s engineering is superb.

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Gil Evans' Out of the Cool in 45rpm Posted Fri Jun 26, 2009, 7:37 PM ET

Acoustic Sounds, Chad Kassem’s Oz of analog wonders, has expanded its line of 45rpm jazz reissues to the Impulse! catalogue. Like the Blue Notes, which Kassem and Mike Hobson’s Classic Records have already covered (at 45, 33-1/3, 180g, 200g, black vinyl, clear vinyl, just about any format you might imagine), the great Impulse! albums were engineered by Rudy Van Gelder and featured the masters of their day—Coltrane, Mingus, Rollins, and, one of the most innovative big-band arrangers in modern jazz, Gil Evans.

Out of the Cool, recorded in 1962, stands as Evans’ grandest achievement, apart from his finest works with Miles Davis fronting the orchestra (Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead), and it’s one of the first of Kassem’s Impulse! 45 releases.

Evans had been one of New York’s leading, though low-key, experimental jazz composers for over a decade at this point. He had a hand in Miles’ Birth of the Cool sessions. Like John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and especially George Russell, he was looking for a way out of bebop’s harmonic maze. A few years before the date, Russell had led Miles to a new “modal” approach, based on ancient church scales, perfected in 1959’s Kind of Blue (Evans, who sat in the control room, may have written the anthemic opening bars of “So What”), and, with Out of the Cool, leading just his big band with no upfront soloist, Evans extended the road to new outposts.

The opening song, “Nevada,” is an audacious thing: there’s practically no chord changes, little melody to speak of; the piece advances entirely through orchestral texture, backed by a bassline and a subtle rhythm of the drums. It becomes almost a trick to see how long Evans can sustain the stasis, yet still make it hum and swing. He does it for 15-1/2 minutes, and the string stays taut, the attention never wavers.

Even without Miles, the band is quite something: Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jimmy Knepper, trombone; Ron Carter, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; to name a few.

To appreciate what they’re doing, you need a stereo system that can reproduce all those tonal colors. Van Gelder did his part with the mikes; and Kassem’s remasterers do theirs with the cutting lathe. Their 45rpm stereo pressing sounds at least as good—in the highs and lows, better—than the original, and that’s saying a lot.

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Advertisement for Myself Posted Mon Jun 22, 2009, 12:22 PM ET

What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t occasionally indulge in self-promotion? So if you’ll forgive my blatancy for a moment, today marks the official pub date of my new book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. Unlike my last book, which was entirely about foreign policy, this one actually might be of some interest to the readers of this space, because it covers not just politics but also culture, society, science, sex—as the title suggests, everything. More to the point, there are three chapters (out of 25) that deal explicitly with jazz. (Key jazz albums of 1959 included Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.) There’s also a chapter about the creation of Motown (another 1959 phenomenon), and a jazz-blues vibe infuses the whole book.

For reviews, blurbs, excerpts, a schedule of my upcoming appearances, and more, go to my website. To buy the book, click here.

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Dave Douglas' Brass Ecstasy Posted Fri Jun 19, 2009, 5:17 PM ET

Trumpeter Dave Douglas’ new album, Spirit Moves, featuring his Brass Ecstasy quintet, is a rouser: hot, cool, raucous, pensive, sometimes all at once, and always a lot of fun. The band’s name is a play on the late Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and they share a similar hard-blowing vibe—as well as two of the players (Luis Bonilla on trombone and Vincent Chancey on French horn)—but where Bowie used the band to riff on the pop tunes of the day (long before The Bad Plus), Douglas’ sources are mainly original tunes with a zesty swing and a dash of his trademark Mediterranean melancholy.

Douglas has been a celebrator of his colleagues in brass (each year, he curates a Trumpet Festival in New York), and Brass Ecstasy lives up to its name; there are no strings or chord instruments (Marcus Rojas on tuba trots the bassline); Nasheet Waits slides around them all on the trapset.

All the players are masters of their domain, and they play together with amazing tightness, though you might not know it at first listen because they smear and sputter just enough to make things grind without tumbling into sloppiness (a tightrope line to walk, much less prance along).

I saw the band at the Jazz Standard Thursday night (they play through Sunday), and everyone was having a merry time. They blow their brains out, and I wonder how their lips will survive through the summer tour they’ve laid out. Go see them if they’re in your town. Sit up front, and let the sound wash over you.

Meanwhile, the album—on Douglas’ self-owned Greenleaf Music label—is a fine sample of what they do, and the sonics are superb: clear, dynamic and, well, brassy.

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Jazz Journalists' Association Prizes, 2009 Posted Thu Jun 18, 2009, 10:39 PM ET

The Jazz Journalists’ Association held its annual awards bash this week, honoring musicians and their work for the period from March 2008 to March 2009. Here’s who won in each of the major categories, followed by who got my vote and why.

NEW RECORD OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Carla Bley, Appearing Nightly.
My Vote: Bill Frisell & Jim Hall, Hemispheres. This guitar-duet recording is a masterpiece, the best thing either player has made in years, and that’s something. I liked Bley’s album a lot; I’d put it in third place, after the Frisell-Hall and Rudresh Mahanthappa’s head-turning, India-inflected Kinsmen.
HISTORICAL RECORD OR REISSUE OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 1.
My Vote: Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol 1. Any critic who voted differently shouldn’t be trusted on anything.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT:
Winner: Lee Konitz.
My Vote: Paul Motian. I’m not complaining; I went back and forth between the two; both have contributed so many innovations over so many decades.
MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Sonny Rollins.
My Vote: Sonny Rollins. No contest.
TENOR SAXOPHONIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Sonny Rollins.
My Vote: Sonny Rollins. Who else?
ALTO SAXOPHONIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Rudresh Mahanthappa.
My Vote: Ornette Coleman. Listen. Not to be doctrinaire, but any year when Ornette Coleman plays a single concert in public, Ornette Coleman is alto saxophonist of the year.
TRUMPETER OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Terence Blanchard.
My Vote: Dave Douglas. Having just come back from seeing Douglas play with his Brass Ecstasy quintet at the Jazz Standard (more about their new CD later), I am all the more insistent on this matter.
CLARINETIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Anat Cohen.
My Vote: Don Byron. As readers of this blog know, I’m a bit smitten with Ms. Cohen, but Byron is the more versatile virtuoso.
PIANIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Hank Jones.
My Vote: Jason Moran. Again, no complaints. Jones is 90 years old and still coaxing magic from the keyboard while playing with horn players half his age. But Moran deserved to win, for his variation on Monk’s Town Hall concert alone.
GUITARIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Bill Frisell.
My Vote: Bill Frisell. He’s been playing at once looser and tighter than ever.

BASSIST OF THE YEAR:
Winner: William Parker.
My Vote: Charlie Haden. This was another close one in my mind. Parker is an ingenious bassist, but each time I see Haden live, I am all the more impressed by the depth of his imagination and the poetry of his phrasing.
DRUMMER OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Brian Blade.
My Vote: Paul Motian. Blade is terrific; he’s the driving force behind Wayne Shorter’s quartet. But c’mon, Motian’s a magician; at 78, he can play anything, in any time, and somehow make it fit with what his bandmates are doing.
STRING PLAYER OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Billy Bang.
My Vote: Erik Friedlander. Bang is a real innovator in the Stuff Smith tradition. But listen to Friedlander’s solo album Block Ice & Propane or his Broken Arm Trio, and tell me this award makes sense.
UP AND COMING MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Esperanza Spalding.
My Vote: Noah Preminger. Spalding’s a gorgeous singer-bassist; I wasn’t knocked out by her debut recording on Blue Note. But, if I’d heard her play on Joe Lovano’s Folk Art before casting my vote, I probably would have checked the box for her. She’s defter than she comes off on her own album.

SMALL ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR:
Winner: S.F. Jazz Ensemble.
My Vote: Jason Moran Trio. This award, I don’t get at all; there are a dozen trios, quartets and quintets I would have picked above this band, including some that these same guys play in
LARGE ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra.
My Vote: Charles Tolliver Big Band. As with Anat Cohen, but more so, readers of this blog know that I worship Maria Schneider. But she didn’t put out a new album this year; Tolliver did a stunning job leading his band through a re-creation of Monk’s Town Hall concert; so…
COMPOSER OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Maria Schneider.
My Vote: Carla Bley. Ditto. I hadn’t heard anything new by Schneider this year (the key words in these prizes are “of the year”) so I went with Bley (who did, after all, win Album of the Year—go figure).
ARRANGER OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Maria Schneider.
My Vote: Maria Schneider. I did pick her for this award—because nobody does arrangements like she does—despite my explanations for voting otherwise in the other categories.

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Joe Lovano & Us Five Posted Sun May 31, 2009, 4:16 PM ET

Joe Lovano’s Folk Art, his 22nd album on the Blue Note label, is an odd, sometimes jarring record—it took a few hearings before I found my bearings—but once the fragments snap into place, it’s a rousing pleaser, bursting with indigo moods, heart-skipped romance, and free-flow funk riffs. Lovano plays all kinds of reeds—tenor sax, straight alto sax, clarinet, and, on one song, the aulochrome, a Hungarian-built horn that’s a double soprano sax (attached to one reed), each side tuned to a different key, so that you blow melody and harmony simultaneously. He plays with a somewhat hardened tone, reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, but with a more soulful sensibility, stemming from his Midwestern roots (his father was a tenor blues saxophonist in Cleveland), though over the past couple decades, he’s played with, and gleaned ideas from, a wide variety of masters, including Hank Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Mel Lewis, to name a few.

His new band—called Us Five—consists of James Weidman, a spry young pianist who seems equally at home with lump-throat ballads and knotty mazes; Esperanza Spalding, a defter, grittier bassist here than on her own (more pop-ish) album; and Otis Brown and Francisco Mela on drums and percussion. The music, all of it composed by Lovano, has a deceptively casual feel—loose and tight, meandering and structured. Lots of small jazz bands aim for this brass-ring sensation; Us Five achieves it, and it’s head-swimming, if you give it your attention and dive in. The album was recorded, after a week of Village Vanguard gigs, at Sear Sound, the purist Manhattan studio, by James Farber, one of the top three or four jazz engineers, and, except for a bit of compression on the percussion, it sounds predictably terrific—vibrant, present, well-balanced, true to tone.

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Jazz at the Chocolate Factory Posted Thu May 28, 2009, 6:15 PM ET

I’ve just found out about a new, and unlikely, place to go hear jazz in New York City: the Cacao Bar at the Chocolate Factory, a.k.a. MarieBelle. Most of the time, it’s a chi-chi café—on the 2nd floor of 762 Madison Avenue, between E. 65th and 66th Streets—that serves hyper-rich chocolates, exotic drinks, and (so I’m told) killer short ribs. But on Wednesday nights, from 7:30 to 10, jazz musicians—a pianist and usually just one or two others (there’s no room for more)—come in and play.

Last night, the players were Frank Kimbrough on piano and Ted Nash alternating between flute and tenor sax. Kimbrough (about whom I’ve written several times in this space) plays in Maria Schneider’s jazz orchestra. Nash is a member of the Jazz At Lincoln Center big band. Both of them also lead, or gamely serve as sideman in, several other bands. More to the point, they’ve been playing together, in one forum or another, for nearly 20 years—first in a Nash-led quartet, then in ensembles led by Kimbrough and bassist Ben Allison—and so last night’s pairing, in so informal a setting, felt like (because it was) two longtime pals getting together and just playing, casually (“What should we play now?” Nash asked after every tune) but also experimentally, each trying out new ideas and novel intervals or rhythms, knowing the other would catch a stumble.

Piano-sax duets can be tricky affairs: there’s no bassist or drummer to anchor the rhythm, no other horns to step in once the ideas have run dry. When the juices are flowing, though, it’s a satisfying combo. There are many terrific piano-sax duet albums, and most of them are terrific, at least in part, because the players know each other well: Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy’s Sempre Amore, Abdullah Ibrahim & Carlos Ward’s Live at Sweet Basil, Vol. 1, David Murray & John Hicks’ Sketches of Tokyo, Art Pepper & George Cables’ Goin’ Home, Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond’s The Duets, Ran Blake & Houston Person’s Suffield Gothic (as well as the duet tracks on Blake & Clifford Jordan’s Masters from Different Worlds, a disc that, I should confess, I co-produced), to name a few.

Kimbrough and Nash dwell in this same territory. Nash has a ripe, rich tone and a knack for extended harmonies and staggered rhythms. Kimbrough is protégé of both Paul Bley and Shirley Horn, and thus knows his way around ballads, avant-garde, and connections in between. As a musician who went with me last night said afterwards, they seem to take a bit from the interplay of Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano (another piano-sax duo, overtly outward bound), though not quite as intricate, a bit more mellow (in a good way). For a sample of Nash, pick up his albums Still Evolved and Sidewalk Meeting. For Kimbrough at his best, listen to his latest solo CD, Air.

And next Wednesday, check out who’s playing at the Chocolate Factory.

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