Andy Navela’s Latin “Party” Album

Pianist Andy Nevala on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Jazz Promo Services)

This coming Friday ZOHO will release a new album of Latin jazz led by pianist Andy Nevala, who is currently based in Atlanta. His influences are both Afro-Cuban and Brazilian. The title of his album is El Rumbon (the party). There are ten tracks, over the course of which Latin sources rub shoulders with the likes of (in order of appearance) Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock with Bennie Maupin, Thelonious Monk, Sting, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane.

As might be expected, there is a diversity of percussion, performed by Frankie Quiñones, Emrah Kotan, and Ireland Faughn. Saxophonist Carlos Averhoff Jr. takes the front line to perform Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” (composed with Denzil Best). However, the tracks, for the most part, are dominated by Nevala’s keyboard work and Quiñones’ percussion work. Each of those tracks serves up its own share of invention, and none of the durations overstay the music’s welcome.

Jazz Chez Hanny: Tim Lin NYC Quartet

Saxophonist Tim Lin on the cover of his latest album (from the Bandcamp Web page)

Yesterday afternoon Frank Hanny announced the first jazz house concert that he will host next month. The performance will feature music from the second CD to be released by saxophonist Tim Lin, entitled Empathy. The album was produced by his own Linsanity Music label; and the tracks include such “classics” as Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low,” Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby,” and Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.” Lin leads a quartet, whose other members are Andy LaVerne on piano, Jay Anderson on bass, and Billy Drummond on drums; and LaVerne is also the composer of one of the tracks, “Fourth Right.”

When he brings these tracks to Chez Hanny, Lin will lead an entirely different quartet. The pianist will be Bay Area regular Charles Chen. In 2019 he won first place at the Jazz Search West competition. Over the past twenty years he as performed at venues such as Yoshi’s and Freight & Salvage, as well as the San Jose Jazz Festival.

The bassist will be Steve LaSpina, who has established a global presence for himself over the last 40 years. That includes appearing at the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Umbria Jazz Festival. During the last decade he has been traveling and recording with guitarist Jim Hall. Recordings under his own name include The Road Ahead and Distant Dreams, the latter featuring performances by Fred Hersch and Ben Monder.

The drummer will be Jeff Hirshfield, who, like Lin, is based in New York. He has also worked with pianist Hersch as a member of the Etc. trio, which also included Steve LaSpina. This is but one of the many combos to which he has contributed his percussion work. In addition he served as a percussionist in the orchestra for the Joffrey Ballet during its 1976–1977 season.

Following the usual case, the performance will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, August 13. The venue is Hanny’s house at 1300 Silver Avenue, with the performance taking place in the downstairs rumpus room. Those planning to attend should think about having cash for a donation of $25. All of that money will go to the musicians. There will be two sets separated by a potluck break. As a result, all who plan to attend are encouraged to bring food and/or drink to share. Seating is first come, first served; and the doors will open at 3:30 p.m. Reservations are preferred by sending electronic mail to jazz@chezhanny.com. Masks are optional, but attendees should be vaccinated. Vaccination will be based on the honor system. Finally, volunteer efforts for cleaning up after the show and moving furniture to accommodate both players and listeners are always appreciated.

Walter White’s “Extra Large” Big Band

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording being discussed

A little over a month ago, jazz trumpeter Walter White completed work on his latest album, entitled Walter White BB XL; and the album was “officially” released on August 28. White leads groups of all sizes, one of which is the Walter White Big Band. This probably accounts for the “BB” in the title, while “XL” suggests that even more players than usual were recruited for this project. It appears that, at the present time, the album is available only for digital download or streaming. While Amazon.com has created a download Web page, the one created by Bandcamp is far more informative, providing much of the information that one would expect to see in an accompanying booklet.

The album presents eight compositions, only three of which are composed by White. However, one of these occupies two tracks, since “Portus Apostoli” is preceded by an “Intro” for just trumpet (White) and piano (Gary Schunk). The other composers involved provide a richly diverse account of the sort of jazz that was being made during the twentieth century. They are, in “order of appearance,” as follows: Dave Brubeck (“Blue Rondo a la Turk”), Herbie Hancock (“Cantaloupe Island”), Horace Silver (“Nica’s Dream”), Jerome Kern (“The Way You Look Tonight”), and Victor Young (“My Foolish Heart”). White prepared his own arrangements of all five of these selections.

The primary emphasis across the album involves brass instruments of a variety of different sizes. That includes solo tuba work from Dan Anderson, although in “My Foolish Heart” he is playing in a register high enough to suggest that he is using a tenor-sized instrument. There is also the usual contingent of saxophones, but their opportunities for solo work are relatively modest. Where the upper register is concerned, White tends to save the “stratospheric” passages for his own instrument.

The results amount to an affectionate reflection on some of the more exciting big band sounds of the last century. Those of my generation may be reminded of many of Stan Kenton’s richest arrangements; and, for many, those stratospheric riffs from White may bring to mind many of the bold and steep ascents played by Maynard Ferguson. The album thus amounts to a heart-felt take on twentieth-century jazz at its most assertively brazen, now viewed (perhaps a bit sentimentally) from a vantage point in the following century.

This may not have been my favorite approach to jazz when it was first being made, but I appreciate the respect it has been accorded by White’s new album.

Miles Davis Quintet in Milan: October, 1964

Miles Davis and Ron Carter in Milan (screen shot from the YouTube video being discussed)

Recent browsing on YouTube led me to an opportunity to examine a film of a performance by what is usually called Miles Davis’ “Second Great Quintet.” This was the quintet led by trumpeter Davis, whose other members were Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums). The film was made at the Teatro dell’Arte in Milan (Italy) on October 11, 1964. Since Shorter joined Davis the preceding September, this would have been the first tour he made with the trumpeter, which seems to have begun in Berlin at the end of that September.

The tour clearly preceded any of the albums made by that quintet, whose studio recording sessions would not begin until January of the following year. As a result, all of the selections were made during what may be called the “Seven Steps” period, which featured “Seven Steps to Heaven,” a tune that Davis composed working with his pianist Victor Feldman. During that period Hancock would replace Feldman; and the primary saxophonist was George Coleman. As a result, all of the selections on the Milan program reflected tunes that had been previously recorded with Coleman.

Most notable of these was another Feldman composition, “Joshua,” which is the last of the five tunes presented on this hour-long video. This is clearly a digitization of a film made during the Milan performance, and image quality leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, the historical significance cannot be overlooked, since within a year the repertoire of this “Second Great Quintet” would become far more adventurous than the music that emerged during the “Seven Steps” period. Indeed, in many respects, “Joshua” is the first sign of the changes that are to come, beginning with the fact that it is the only piece on the Milan program that begins with playing by both trumpet and saxophone.

However, most of the program reflects “standards” that would have registered with collectors of Davis albums. These include “real” standards, such as “Autumn Leaves,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “All of You,” along with the Davis composition “All Blues,” which, for all intents and purposes, had achieved “standards status.” The program also marks one of the earliest recorded instances of Davis providing his own “sign-off” theme.

If image quality leaves more than a little to be desired, there is still much to say about what one can observe. Most interesting is probably the detachment between Davis and Shorter. This is not a matter of either of them being disagreeable. Rather, it shows the extent to which Davis is willing to “give up the spotlight” to allow Shorter to improvise without any threat of interruption. One result is that the improvisations are so free that many listeners will be hard-pressed to identify the tune being improvised.

Since my own instrument is the piano, I particularly appreciated the camera looking down at the keyboard from over Hancock’s left shoulder. Watching him at work, one develops a better appreciation of how frequently he is working with a single monophonic line, seldom providing much by way of harmonic context with the left hand. It is almost as if Hancock wants his own improvisations to fit comfortably with the monophonic outpourings of both Davis and Shorter. On the other hand the camera gives very little attention to the rhythm work, although the smiles given off by Williams are sure to raise the spirits of even the most dead-serious viewers. My only real regret with this viewing/listening experience is that I never really had the opportunity to experience Carter’s rich capacity for invention.

Thoughts About Blue Note Inspired by Huber

Yesterday afternoon I went over to the Castro Theatre to see Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes. This documentary by Sophie Huber was screened by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, presumably because Blue Note was founded by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, both of whom came to the United States in the Thirties. We hear little of their voices over the course of the 85-minute film; but we learn that both of them had their “first contact” with jazz through recordings in Germany. While the film says little of how they found each other and then committed jointly to the business of making jazz recordings, the viewer still learns much about their work styles.

As might be guessed, there is not much by way of film footage associated with performances of jazz selections that made Blue Note such a first-class resource of audio documentation of jazz history. On the other hand Wolff was also a passionate photographer and was almost obsessively taking photographs of musicians at work during recording sessions. Those photographs have become as important a part of jazz history as have the many recordings that Blue Note released of almost all of the major jazz makers during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

By the time Huber set to work on her documentary, only a few of those jazz giants were around to be interviewed. Nevertheless, for those of us with intense interest in the emergence of bebop and the adventurous styles that followed up on it, the experience of listening to Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter sitting side by side and reminiscing was, at P. T. Barnum liked to say, “worth the price of admission.” The other significant voice from the past was Lou Donaldson; but Hancock and Shorter have worked together for so long that they could play off each other (as they had done so many times when playing jazz) in discussing what they did and how they did it.

The Blue Note catalog is so extensive that trying to account for it with any sense of thoroughness would require a project more in the spirit of Downton Abbey than an 85-minute documentary. The best Huber could manage by way of survey was a rapid-fire series of images of album covers (most of which probably registered with me only because I remembered them from my own collecting experiences). What made the documentary more interesting, however, was not how it reflected on the past but on Huber’s decision to include Robert Glasper and his colleagues, such as Ambrose Akinmusire, allowing them to reflect on how Blue Note recordings had influenced them and then talk about where those influences led their own jazz-making techniques.

This turned out to be just as interesting as any of the reflections on the past. Indeed, for the “grand finale” of the film, we saw Hancock and Shorter sit in with Glasper and his crew for what could be called a “jamming past and present” session. I have seen a few of these encounters in some of my past performance experiences. More often than not, they amount to the “young Turks” doing their thing after which the “masters” show them how it is really done. Huber, on the other hand, managed to catch the spirit of the dialectical opposition of past and present leading to a synthesis in which both sides contributed equally.

Mind you, my own sentiments are still back there in the days when Hancock and Shorter were two of the leading voices in Miles Davis’ second great quintet. Like many of my age, I listen to the young ones and think of how much more they have to learn. After watching the final footage of Huber’s film, however, I am beginning to think that the learning is getting somewhere, even if my own listening habits have not yet caught up with it.

Obituary: Rudy Van Gelder

It seems appropriate that Peter Keepnews wrote the obituary for The New York Times following the news that Rudy Van Gelder died yesterday at his home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The very first recordings that Thelonious Monk made for Keepnews’ father Orrin for eventual release on Riverside took place in July of 1955, back when the Van Gelder Studio was still in Hackensack, New Jersey. At that time Van Gelder still had a day job as an optometrist. His recording gigs were more profitable, but optometry was steady work. It provided the money he needed to purchase new recording equipment and eventually to build his own studio into his home in Englewood Cliffs, where he spent the rest of his life.

The major labels that used Van Gelder’s services regularly were Blue Note Records, Prestige Records, and Impulse! Records. One could compile an anthology of modern jazz based on the sessions that he engineered. That anthology would include such albums as A Love Supreme by the John Coltrane Quartet, Walkin’ with the Miles Davis All Stars, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage on Blue Note, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus on Prestige, and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father on Blue Note.

However, rattling off titles says little about the real value of what Van Gelder brought to his work. These were all recordings of combos in which, by all rights, the leader was first among equals. Van Gelder knew how to bring clarity to every voice in a combo, not only in capturing solo takes but also in finding just the right levels to reproduce the intended blending in “chorus” sections. The fact that the very sound of the Sixties (and, to a great extent the Fifties) continues to be such a recognizable sign of how jazz was being made half a century ago owes much to both the fidelity of Van Gelder’s equipment and his impeccable skill behind a mixing board.

Without Van Gelder’s contributions to the making of recordings, it would be almost impossible for anyone today to write a useful account of jazz practices when modernism was so prolific in so many different ways.

More on Miles' "Second Quintet"

After having spent most of yesterday's post ranting about Columbia's "user hostile" production values, particularly where their vast library of recordings of Miles Davis is concerned, I feel a need to explain why, however unpleasant the Columbia product may be, the compilation of sessions of Miles' "second quintet" with Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), is what I called an "absolute 'must'" when it comes to learning to listen to jazz. It is not just the abundance of creative approaches that all five of these musicians take in their solos. It is also that, while Miles may be the leader (and probably would not have wanted to be regarded as anything other), when it came to the compositions and charts that were actually performed for these sessions, the regime was refreshingly democratic. In the six discs in the collection, all five of the quintet members get several substantial opportunities to assume the responsibility of composer. Thus, we find diversity not only in solo work (which is where we usually expect it in jazz) but also in the very logic, grammar, and rhetoric of the charts that provide the frameworks for those solos. In other words this was not a "standards" quintet or a "Miles" quintet; rather, it was a "polyglot" quintet, equally fluent in five compositional languages because of the intense intimacy that bound together these five musicians. This makes a marked contrast to John Coltrane's "Classic Quartet," whose language is "pure" Coltrane, applied to both standards and Coltrane originals.

This distinction may also address my concluding point yesterday about why Trane seems to get better radio coverage than Miles. As we build up our listening acquaintance with Trane, even if we do not do it diachronically, we "acquire his language," particularly in the rich diversity of his solos, which always see to have one more thought to add to the perspective. With Miles the "language acquisition problem" is far more challenging. One might say that his language kept changing faster than we can keep up with it, due in no small part to his decision to work in what I just called "polyglot" settings. Thus, it does not lend itself to casual radio listening, where a single performance will get included in a "set" with whatever the announcer seems to think makes for a suitable context. (Don't get me started on "shuffling!") There are, of course, certain "classics" that can hold up under such treatment, two of which, for better or worse, happen to be Columbia products: Sketches of Spain, which I cited yesterday (and, as I just discovered, even figured into an episode of Mad Men), and Kind of Blue. Radio broadcasters have no problems with these albums; but, when we get into those "second quintet" sessions, we are confronted head-on with the distinction that Igor Stravinsky liked to make between listening and hearing. This takes us far beyond the scope of what radio can do for us into a domain where all we have is our own ability to learn to listen to our own recordings (since we can no longer hear actual performances by that quintet). However, if we are serious about wanting to be better listeners, then we should not shirk from the challenge of venturing into that domain!