Another Penthouse Album from Jazz Detective

Cal Tjader on the cover of his Catch the Groove album

Yesterday I wrote about wrapping up a series of three Ahmad Jamal albums with the title Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse. These were produced by Zev Feldman for the Jazz Detective label, and this morning I encountered another Feldman production of Penthouse recordings. The release involves six sets led by vibraphonist Cal Tjader performing with a variety of different quintets. This time the title is Catch The Groove: Live at the Penthouse (1963–1967). Like the final Jamal album, Catch The Groove will be released this coming Friday; and, once again, Amazon has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

I have to confess that, while I have been aware of Tjader’s name since my campus radio days, I paid little attention to his albums. Now that retirement allows me more time to expand my musical interests, I have to say that I was engaged in Catch The Groove as much as I had been with the Jamal releases. Thanks to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I have been able to enjoy “close-up” views of vibraphone performances; and I have to confess that I envy the proficiency that a good vibraphonist commands. In that context I would say that Tjader was (he died on May 5, 1982) so proficient that he may have even educated himself by listening to piano improvisations and then working out how he could take his instrument down similar paths.

Another confession I have to make is that almost all of Tjader’s quintet partners were unfamiliar to me. The one exception is the pianist in the first of the sets, Clare Fischer. Fischer’s own work tends to “straddle” the domains of both classical and jazz; and that set provided one of the rare occasions where I could appreciate her approaches to jazz improvisation.

However, a more consistent setting that spans all six of the sets is the Latin side of the percussion work. Two percussionists contribute to this Penthouse collection, Johnny Rae for the first three sets and Carl Burnett for the remainder. To the best of my knowledge, these were “first contact” experiences involving both of them; but there was much to draw my attention to not only their solo takes but also their “punctuations” of Tjader’s improvisations.

It is also worth noting that this new album is the first official release of previously unissued live Tjader performances in nearly twenty years. Thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that one of his albums was recorded at the Blackhawk, here in San Francisco, not too long before the first Penthouse set on this new release. I should probably try to check out that album to see how much context it provides for these newly-discovered tracks.