Marcus J. Moore Promotes Blue Note Records

Once again I find myself taking issue with Marcus J. Moore over at The New York Times. Some readers may recall that, back in July of 2023, I took him to task for his article “Five Minutes Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz.” However, just like that wind-up bunny toy, Moore appears to just keep going and going. The title of this morning’s article is “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Blue Note Records.” Mind you, it will take any serious reader more than five minutes to go through the fourteen items on the list, with each contributor having a different background.

Nevertheless, I fear that this article was written more as publicity for what its Wikipedia page calls the “Modern era” of Blue Note Records, rather than an examination of the rich diversity one encounters in pursuing the history of jazz, particularly that period of history that dominated the second half of the last century. Mind you, Blue Note accounts for a significant sector of my jazz recordings, many of which are due to the box sets compiled by Mosaic Records. Nevertheless, there were only three tracks in the Times list that could be found in my own collection:

1. Wayne Shorter, “Speak No Evil”
2. Sonny Rollins, “Striver’s Row”
3. Grachan Moncur, III, “Evolution”

I should also note, out of fairness, that my copy of the last of those three selections was not included in my Blue Note collection. Rather, it was part of a Japanese Collection called Jazz Master Series, which, if I am believe the back cover, was properly licensed from the United Artists Music and Records Group in 1975.

Robert Glasper, my favorite “loyal opposition” (2013 photograph by SSPoffice, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license) 

Of course, there are any number of artists on the Times list that have secure positions in my collection. These would include Lee Morgan’s Party Time, Donald Byrd’s Chant, and Bobby Hutcherson’s “Avis.” On the other hand (as some will say), I suspect that many of my readers would have recognized my cringing at the presence of Robert Glasper. Glasper did not appear on Blue Note until 2005. By that time Mosaic had run its course of a prodigious number of box sets of Blue Note sources. After Mosaic had accounted for over 30 years of the second half of the twentieth century, there may have been a lingering sprit of what that label represented; but the “flesh” just was not there.

Had it not been for the Times, I would not have launched into writing this article. Nor would I have been grooving on “Speak No Evil” while writing it! Whatever Glasper’s intentions may have been, I have come to grips with the fact that Blue Note is not Blue Note any more. I have no trouble with this state of affairs, given that I have more than enough tracks that can hold their own against the many albums in my classical collection!

Disappointing Jazz Visit from Oberlin

Last night the SFJAZZ Center provided the venue for a free concert performed by the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, launched and led by Bobby Ferrazza, Professor of Jazz Guitar at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The group was a septet with a front line of vocalist Gabi Allemana, Harrison Fink on saxophone, and trumpeter Avery Ghose. Rhythm was provided by the “standard trio” of piano (Matthew Tanner III), bass (Ahmed McLemore), and drummer Aaron Yanda, joined by Tim Picard on guitar. The repertoire included a few Rollins originals but overall, like Rollins himself, spanned a fair account of the twentieth century.

Overall, the experience was an uneven one; but there was no questioning the impeccable musicianship and capacity for invention that could be found in the rhythm section. Each of the four players had his own turn to take as a soloist, and I suspect that all of the serious jazz lovers in the audience would have been more than happy to hear more of them. Unfortunately, discretion required that they withdraw into the background for the better part of the gig, which lasted about an hour.

Sadly, none of the front line performers came anywhere close to the technical skills of their accompanists. Allemana’s lack of clear diction was matched only by the uncertainty of her sense of pitch. Both of the horns, on the other hand, played as if they were not listening to what they were doing. Quality of tone was distressingly shallow and the few ventures into improvisation could not have been less imaginative. As a result, we had four skilled musicians that may well have a promising future as a quartet unto itself; and we have three other individuals on stage that might be better off looking into their respective family businesses.

Craft Reissues Sonny Rollins on Contemporary

2011 photograph of Sonny Rollins in performance (photographed by Tom Beetz, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Once again I find myself doing my best to keep up with the efforts of Craft Recordings to remaster many of the finest jazz albums of the past. Most recently I wrote about two Craft releases this past March. One of these was The Birth of Bop, a 30-track anthology of the generous number of bebop performers that recorded for Savoy. More focused was the remastering of the Contemporary Records album Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section on which Pepper performed with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, all of whom date back to the Miles Davis Quintet recording sessions with Prestige that began in November of 1955.

This past Friday saw the latest Craft release of remastered Contemporary albums. Go West!: The Contemporary Records Albums is a three-CD box set that accounts for all of the recordings made by saxophonist Sonny Rollins for Contemporary. To be fair, this involved only two Rollins albums, Way Out West and Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders. The “leaders” on that album were pianist Hampton Hawes, guitarist Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar on bass, Shelly Manne on drums, and, on two tracks, Victor Feldman on vibraphone (identified on the album as “vibraharp”). Way Out West, on the other hand, was a trio album with Ray Brown on bass and Manne on drums. The third CD accounts for alternate takes of tracks from both of the Contemporary albums. The entire collection is also available on three vinyl discs and for MP3 download.

Unfortunately, my only writing about Rollins took place during my tenure with Examiner.com, when I covered his performance in Davies Symphony Hall for the 30th Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival in the fall of 2012. I have a vague memory of having seen him earlier at Herbst Theatre, when I observed to a man sharing a box with me that there were some “Stockhausen moments” in Rollins’ improvisations. (For as long as I can remember, I have entertained the fantasy that Karlheinz Stockhausen kept a “secret stash” of jazz albums in his basement!)

I was already familiar with the Go West! content through the box set The Freelance Years: The Complete Riverside & Contemporary Recordings, a five-CD box set, which is still available. However, I appreciated the opportunity to home in on the Contemporary side of that collection; and I was definitely not disappointed. The cowboy songs on Way Out West are clearly tongue-in-cheek; but I have always relished their muted sense of humor. The more traditional offerings on the Contemporary Leaders album have a more than generous share of wit; but there is also a sincere honoring of what makes a standard a standard, so to speak.

Rollins is still alive, but he retired in 2014 “due to recurring respiratory issues” (as reported on his Wikipedia page). His appearance at Davies took place during his last season of public performances. I definitely appreciated the opportunity to listen to him in performance (at least) once. I was also struck by his close relationship with Thelonious Monk, which I learned about when reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s Monk biography. Rollins may not have been as arcane as Monk, but his recordings reveal an extensive (and frequently adventurous) capacity for improvisation. I seem to have accumulated quite a few of his albums, and I treasure them all.

More “Neglected Corners” from Broadbent’s Trio

courtesy of Play MPE

About two month ago Savant Records released its latest album of the Alan Broadbent Trio. This site discussed its predecessor, Trio in Motion, in January of 2021. At that time I cited a sentence from the booklet notes provided by Kirk Silsbee: “Broadbent continually looks into the neglected corners of the jazz repertory and the Great American Songbook for material.” In his new album, Like Minds, pianist Broadbent is still poking around those neglected corners with his trio “partners in crime,” Harvie S on bass and Billy Mintz on drums.

Personally, I could not be happier with the opportunity to explore those corners with him. Once again, he has brought a refreshing new perspective to a Charlie Parker standard, “Yardbird Suite.” He did not return to Lester Young on this new album, but he did take on an engaging tune by Bud Powell, “Blue Pearl.” I tend to view Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin” as a classic; but I certainly cannot complain about the way in which the Broadbent Trio drew it into the spotlight. On the other hand I can accept Hank Mobley’s “This I Dig of You” as one of those “neglected corners” compositions; and it is definitely well served by taking the opening track of Like Minds.

Once again, Broadbent offers one of his own compositions. In arranging this particular album, “This I Dig of You” serves as an “overture” to his own contribution, “Prelude to Peace.” Among the other neglected corners, I suppose the one that interested me the most was the one occupied by Kurt Weill. “This is New” is one of the songs he wrote for the musical Lady in the Dark with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin. Another neglected tune is Jule Styne’s “Dance Only with Me,” setting words by the master pair of lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green. More familiar (to me at least) are Clara Edwards’ “With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair” (words by Jack Lawrence) and “Stairway to the Stars,” which Matty Malneck and Frank Signorelli extracted from their Park Avenue Fantasy to accommodate lyrics by Mitchell Parish.

It is also important to note that, while Broadbent may steer his interpretations of all of these tunes, he always allows for solo improvisations from his bass and drum players. Like Trio in Motion, this album is an engaging account of how three highly skilled players in the present know how to honor tunes from the past. Listening to these tracks is no more a matter of nostalgia than is a visit to Davies Symphony Hall to listen to the music of Jean Sibelius. In spite of the ways in which current technology tends to undermine a commitment to attentive listening, it is comforting to know that both recordings and performances are being made to encourage such listening practices. As long as there are musicians that honor those practices, I expect that I shall continue to write about them.

Roger Kellaway is Back with Straight-Ahead Jazz

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the beginning of last month, Roger Kellaway celebrated his 80th birthday. As a professional musician and alumnus of the New England Conservatory of Music, Kellaway has had his thumb in more pies than I could possibly enumerate; and he has managed to pull any number of tasty plums from many, if not most, of them. Nevertheless, “Remembering You,” the closing theme for All in the Family may have been his best shot at mass recognition.

However, those of us more interested in serious listening, rather than mass appeal, will probably gain more from listening to Kellaway’s latest album, released by IPO Recordings. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway consists of seven tracks recorded from performances at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles. Kellaway is back in a straight-ahead jazz groove behind a piano keyboard, where he leads a trio whose other members are Bruce Forman on guitar and Dan Lutz on bass. As of this writing, Amazon.com is only distributing this as an MP3 album; and Google has not been particularly helpful in finding a source that is selling the album in a physical medium.

From the very first track, Kellaway seizes listener attention by going back to the basics of Thelonious Monk. Too many modern jazz artists have used Monk’s “52nd Street Theme” as “sign-off” music, meaning that too many listeners know the music through only one motif. (Grumbling about Miles Davis may now commence!) Kellaway’s trio deconstructs and reconstructs the full thematic richness of this composition, charging through the building blocks of the piece at a breakneck pace, the perfect way to get listeners on board for the diversity of selections that will follows.

The Monk track is coupled with music by one of his long-time colleagues. Sonny Rollins is represented with his tune “Doxy.” However, the overall scope of the album also reaches back to the book for Duke Ellington’s band, including one of Billy Strayhorn’s most familiar compositions, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Caravan,” which Ellington wrote in partnership with Juan Tizol. There are also instrumental accounts of two “songbook” selections, “Night and Day” by Cole Porter and “Have You Met Miss Jones” by Richard Rodgers. Finally, there is one selection from the Dave Brubeck book, Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”

For my money listening gets most interesting when Kellaway and his colleagues are not afraid to exercise prolonged improvisation. “Have You Met Miss Jones” runs longer than ten minutes, while “Take the ‘A’ Train” exceeds the twelve-minute limit. However, even when durations are shorter, this album consistently explores how trio work can mine considerable inventiveness out of even the most familiar of tunes. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway is definitely an album for any lister serious about the scope of jazz improvisation; and, however marketing may currently be trying to shape the very practices of listening, this is an album that deserves beginning-to-end listening attention for what it is, a document of a gig in Los Angeles that has now be preserved for posterity.

Old Folks Play “Old Folks” Affectionately

Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett, and Gary Peacock (photograph by Patrick Hinely, courtesy of ECM Records)

This past Friday ECM released the latest album of performances by what has come to be called “the Standards trio.” This is a group led from the piano by Keith Jarrett, playing with Gary Peacock on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Among the standards included on this “document” of a session presented in Newark, New Jersey in November of 1998 is a particularly affectionate account of Willard Robison’s “Old Folks,” which I first remember having heard sung by a vocal combo (probably with a big band), whom I have not yet managed to identify. For those who might think of my headline as “agist,” I should note that I passed the milestone of my 70th birthday in 2016; and I am younger than all three members of this trio! (For the record, “Old Folks” was written in 1938, making it younger than Peacock and older than both Jarrett and DeJohnette.)

I have to say that age has provided a certain satisfaction in what now counts for “standards.” When I am told that a group is going to play standards, I tend not to expect to hear compositions by Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Paul Desmond, and John Coltrane. However, collectively they account for five of the tracks on a two-CD album encompassing twelve tracks. I call that a statistically significant presence of music described as “far out” during my student days!

Mind you, the session at which these tracks were recorded took place almost twenty years ago. Perhaps that may be the key to why this new album is entitled After The Fall. At the time of that Newark date, the members of the trio could probably say that they were in, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “the autumn of our life.” Twenty years on autumn has passed into winter (for them as well as for myself). One way to approach the album title would be by putting Gilbert’s phrase (taken from The Yeomen of the Guard) into its full context:

In the autumn of our life,

Here at rest in ample clover,

We rejoice in telling over

Our impetuous May and June.

When viewed retrospectively from 1998, jazzmen such as Parker, Powell, and Coltrane could easily stand for those “impetuous” younger days as they were enjoyed by the likes of Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette. For the record, my own first encounter with DeJohnette took place somewhere in the mid-Sixties at the Village Vanguard. That date was shared by Mose Allison and Thelonious Monk (impetuous, indeed!); and I cannot retrieve from memory with whom DeJohnette was playing that night.

With all that as context for the basis of this recording, Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette were all still pretty damned impetuous in 1998. Perhaps that is why they could effect the transition of their impetuous predecessors into “standards status.” Now that the calendar has advanced another twenty years, it is hard to think of any of them resting “in ample clover.” Instead, we should wonder what they would now classify as “standards” should they decide to gather for another gig some time during the course of this year.

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.

On the "Historical Record" of Modern Jazz

Anyone who has seen the German documentary, Blue Note - A Story of Modern Jazz, as I did back when the Ovation Channel was still in business, can be forgiven for taking it to be the story of modern jazz. However, while there is no denying the major role that Blue Note played in cultivating the necessary listening skills for the new sounds of jazz that began to emerge after the Second World War, it would be a mistake to overlook some of the other labels that issued recordings without which any historical study of jazz would be woefully inadequate. Consider, for example, those two works that had been so influential to Anthony Braxton, Albert Ayler's "Bells" and John Coltrane's "Ascension," both of which were produced by Bob Thiele for Impulse! Records. Admittedly, Creed Taylor would not have been able to launch Impulse! in 1960 had Blue Note not prepared listeners for their "new wave of jazz;" but, if we are to accept Ashley Kahn's epithet for Impulse! as "The House that Trane Built," we should remember that Coltrane's work with Blue Note was relatively modest (which is not to dismiss the significance of Blue Train) and that much of his truly formative work (including his recordings with Miles Davis' "first quintet") was produced by Prestige. I find myself writing this because I have come to realize that much of my appreciation of "emerging voices" comes from the Prestige anthologies I have acquired over the years, which include (in alphabetical order) John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. These CD collections are products of meticulous compilation by Eric Miller (Dolphy and Monk) and the venerable Orrin Keepnews (Coltrane, Davis, and Rollins); and they are invaluable resources for anyone (like myself) who believes that both composition and performance are best understood through opportunities for diachronic listening. When I then consider the richness of the notes that accompany each of these collections, I realize how clueless "Audiophiliac" Steve Guttenberg is in his despair over a report that "projects that it won't be until 2012 that download sales surpass CD sales." However, this is not the first time I have had to recognize that Guttenberg seems more interested in listening to high-quality digital sounds, rather than high-quality performances of music!