Music – Page 6 – Jarrett House North

Old mix: the blue groove of twilight

One of the things that happened when I got to the University of Virginia was that I began to branch out in my musical tastes—or, maybe more precisely, I began to explore each of the branches I had already grown to like. In this case, it was jazz, and while I had made mix tapes containing jazz music before, this was the first to be (almost) entirely devoted to jazz.

I found my way into jazz from Sting, whose band in the mid to late 1980s was made up of jazz musicians; from summer concerts at Fort Monroe; and from my mom’s record collection. She had some Ahmad Jamal and Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis—nothing too outré but enough to convince me that I wanted to listen to more. I also knew, from U2, that I ought to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I didn’t really know anyone else who listened to jazz, so I had to find my own way in.

Because I liked to read liner notes, I found myself drawn to the Original Jazz Classics reissue series of classic jazz albums on CD when I was at UVA. There was so much context on the back of those albums! You could see who the players were, read reviews, and more without even opening the album. That’s how I started to dig back into some of the great ’50s and ’60s recordings. I also picked up the threads of Sting’s band, listening to Branford, then Wynton, then Wynton’s band and Kenny Kirkland.

Because I have never been able to focus exclusively, a couple of jazz-adjacent tracks snuck onto this mix. Most notably, “Escalay” from the Kronos Quartet Pieces of Africa appears. While this is nominally a classical or world music track, it has enough in common with the works around it—a strong rhythmic foundation, a modal scale, an improvised solo—to fit in nicely. The other, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” was added to provide an anchor point for some of the other explorations of blues through the jazz idiom on Side 2. And I couldn’t figure out how to end the mix, so I dropped some Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in; it fits better than you’d think because of the vocal improvisation and the general mood.

For the actual jazz tracks, there’s a pretty good range of stuff. Of course we touch on Kind of Blue, but there’s also Coltrane’s Sound and Ellington Indigos. I really like the tracks from Marcus Roberts, the pianist and composer who was the nucleus of Wynton Marsalis’s late-1980s/early-1990s band. And there are a couple of nice sets on the second side, with the early jazz workouts of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins contrasting with the more abstract work of Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman and Kenny Kirkland.

Brother Veal – Wynton Marsalis Septet (Blue Interlude)
Nebuchadnezzar – Marcus Roberts (Deep In The Shed)
Central Park West – John Coltrane (Coltrane’s Sound)
Escalay – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
All Blues – Miles Davis (Kind of Blue)
All the Things You Are – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
As Serenity Approaches – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
The Jitterbug Waltz – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
Love In Vain Blues (Alternate Take) – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
Perdido Street Blues – Louis Armstrong (Louis Armstrong Of New Orleans)
My Melancholy Baby [Alternate Take] – Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker (Bird And Diz (+3))
Paradox – Sonny Rollins (Worktime)
Willow Weep For Me – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
Simpatico – Misterioso – Howard Shore/Ornette Coleman (Naked Lunch)
Chance – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
Big Trouble In the Easy (Pedro Pops Up) – Wynton Marsalis (Tune In Tomorrow… The Original Soundtrack)
Crepuscule With Nellie (Take 6) – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
Amazing Grace – Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon (Journey Of Dreams)

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, you can listen to (most of) the mix here:

Old mix: An angel being blown backwards into the future

Prodded by yesterday’s post about Pieces of Africa and the mixes it inspired, I was inspired to post about a few of them. These were mix tapes—made well before the advent of Rip.Mix.Burn—and they reflected whatever was going through my brain at the time.

This mix was made early in the summer of 1993. I had just finished my third year at the University of Virginia and was interning in a physics lab, and slowly coming to the painful conclusion that I would not be going on to graduate study in my field. But it was sunny, and I was reasonably happy! So this was made to play in my car with the top down.

Like so many of the mixes I made (and still make), this was a way for me to digest all the CDs I had bought and listened to, whether from Plan 9 or in the BMG music club, which sold classical and other CDs at a substantial discount if you didn’t mind the occasionally blurry reproductions of album art and liner notes they suspiciously sported…

But summer of 1993 was still a pretty good time. Frank Black had just changed his name and released his first solo album; Sting’s latest showed he still had songwriting chops. I had met a singer from a woman’s chorus on a Glee Club tour who moved me deeply, to the tune of a Suzanne Vega song. Peter Gabriel’s Real World was still introducing me to new voices like Sheila Chandra. My friends in the New Dominions had just recorded their first CD, for which I did the jacket and disc design, working around a brilliant illustration by Deepak Raghu. I had heard Tori Amos for the first time in concert at Old Cabell Hall, being lucky enough to score tickets after a Glee Club rehearsal. I was starting to explore jazz beyond Coltrane and Miles and Wynton and Branford. Good times indeed.

Fu Manchu – Frank Black (Frank Black)
99.9 F° – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Before You Were Born – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
Ever So Lonely/Eyes/The Ocean – Sheila Chandra (Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices)
Ava – David Byrne (The Forest)
Tin Man – New Dominions (Salamander!)
Tilliboyo – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
Road To Nowhere – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
Precious Things – Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes)
The Dream Before – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels)
Seven Days – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Drawing Room Blues – Joe Henderson (Lush Life – The Music of Billy Strayhorn)
Sassy – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
Ed Is Dead – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
Warning Sign – Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings And Food)
As Girls Go – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Dirt In The Ground – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
Death Of A Train – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
Washing Of The Water – Peter Gabriel (Us)
Motorway To Roswell – The Pixies (Trompe Le Monde)

If you have Apple Music, you can listen to the mix here, though it doesn’t include all the tracks… 🙁

Errata: Although “Upside Down” is in the track listing on the j-card for the tape, it wouldn’t fit on the end of Side 1. So I saved it for another mix.

Also noting: I added a page to the blog to track all the articles about mixes.

Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa

Album of the Week, March 18, 2023

Coming from the austerity of Black Angels, you might be forgiven for thinking of the Kronos Quartet as a Very Serious Ensemble™. So the opening track on Pieces of Africa, the driving “Mai Nozipo,” might come as a shock. There’s not much austerity here. Instead, there are Ngoma drums and shakers (hosho) from Zimbabwe, played by the composer Dumisani Maraire, and a melody, in a major key, that seems as much driven by the rhythm as floating above it. But Pieces of Africa wasn’t a departure for Kronos; it was the logical outcome of their practice of commissioning new works for string quartet—and the growing accessibility of “world music” as a viable market segment.

All of Kronos’s recordings on the Nonesuch label, where they rubbed shoulders with late 20th century giants like Steve Reich, championed new music and new composers. This was partly born from ideological bent and partly from necessity, given a gap in the market between the existing repertoire for string quartet and Kronos’ aspirations. On their second album for Nonesuch, titled White Man Sleeps, the title work was a commission by South African/Swiss composer Kevin Volans, who sought to reconcile the music of Black South Africa with European 20th century compositional forms. Only the first and fifth movements of the quartet appeared on the album, however. But in the year following Black Angels the quartet released a series of “CD singles” of individual compositions, including Volans’ String Quartet No. 2 “Hunting/Gathering.” One supposes the renewed collaboration may have spurred the idea of recording the entirety of “White Man Sleeps,” which found its way onto the album.

Kronos founder David Harrington has also commented that the piece had roots in his tenth grade music class, when he heard recordings of music from Ghana that touched him and inspired the thought that “I really want my violin to have that kind of a sound someday.” He built relationships with other African composers over the years, resulting in the works on the album.

Indeed, the Volans quartet is something of an outlier on the album. Most of the works here are more like “Mai Nozipo”: melodic, joyous, rhythmic, and written for quartet augmented with other sounds including percussion, African string instruments, and voice. The second work is in a minor mode but no less buoyant for that, and features the first vocals, by the Moroccan composer Hassan Hakmoun and his party.

The third, “Tilliboyo,” is a work that I have some personal history with. Written for kora and string quartet by Gambian composer Foday Musa Suso, it’s a meditative but quietly bright work that burbles along on the strength of the interaction between the plucked lower strings and kora and the bowed first violin melody. I have, at various times, put it on mix tapes and used it as radio intro music for a radio commercial on WTJU asking community-area writers to send in their poetry and prose to the literary magazine I was trying to get off the ground, Rag & Bone. The fourth track, Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza’s “Ekitundu Ekisooka,” continues in a similar optimistic vein, but with a stronger rhythmic drive.

“Escalay (Waterwheel),” by the late Nubian Egyptian composer Hamza El Din, is a horse of a different color. Beginning with a slow introduction on the lute, first solo then accompanied by pizzicato strings, one hears the water start to drip slowly into the raceway of the mill, before the tempo picks up and a driving theme enters in the cello. The violin plays a meditative exploration of the theme above the other strings as the piece stretches into a long coda (this is the longest single track on the record, at over twelve minutes). The effect is trance-inducing and almost minimalist. It’s another work that found its way onto mix tapes, despite its length, as is the following song, Obo Addy’s “Wawshishijay (Our Beginning)” (which featured on my 1992 mix “Sing into my mouth”). “Wawshishijay” includes polyrhythms on various percussion instruments played by the composer, and a sung chorus in the second “verse.”

“White Man Sleeps” follows (on the CD track list, which I believe to be the original sequence), and what is immediately apparent in the first movement is Volans’ affinity for the minimalist composers. If you’re not prepared for the high repetition of the theme in the violins at the end, it might drive you to distraction. But the second and fourth movements have more traditional melodies and are almost surprisingly sweet after the austerity of the first movement. The third and fifth movements return to the more minimal statements, here played in the lowest strings. At the time, I found it the least compelling music on the album, but now the second movement in particular strikes me as standing alongside some of the strongest melodic statements for string quartet that Kronos ever made.

The final track (in the CD sequence; on the LP it closes out side three) is the hymn-like singalong “Kutambarara (Spreading),” again by Maraire. This one is truly the summation: polyrhythms in the percussion and mbira, lead vocals by the composer, a full on African choir. What it doesn’t have is much of a soloistic presence from the Kronos Quartet, who are here strictly to provide the chords and carry a constant rhythmic pulse. They seem pretty happy to be along for the ride, though, and inevitably this was another track that my 20-year-old self splashed onto mix tapes.

Granted that I was always a little weird about putting whatever genre I wanted onto a mix tape, but that fact that I’ve used that phrase about multiple tracks on a string quartet album suggests there is definitely something unusual about this one. The listening public thought so too: it became the first album to top the Billboard charts for both classical and world music recordings. I haven’t bought much Kronos on vinyl; they were already firmly into the CD age at their beginning. But the fact that this album was reissued a few years ago speaks to its appeal. It’s a jubilant record from start to finish and one well worth spending time with.

You can listen to the album here:

Kronos Quartet, Black Angels

Album of the Week, March 11, 2023

I’ve written about my experience finding Black Angels before, in the year of the 30th anniversary of the release of the album. Everything about what I wrote then remains true now: the searing intensity of the performances, the indelible impression it made on my memory. But how did Kronos get into the place where they made this recording?

It starts with the title piece. David Harrington has said that a 1973 performance of George Crumb’s quartet in protest of the Vietnam War was his inspiration to found Kronos, and you can hear his love for the work in the intensity of the performance. You can also hear something else: the degree of studio engineering it took to realize the experience. “Black Angels” features amplified string instruments, a gong and other percussion instruments as well as chanting and other sounds, and the recording brings all the unusual sound to the fore and, well, beats the listener about the head and shoulder with it. It’s inescapable and haunting, and the quiet opening of the middle movement is as powerfully contemplative as anything on record. The middle movement also features the chanted “Ein, zwei, drei, veir” (here pronounced fear) and a moment of contemplative requiem performed by the lower strings, with the high strings sounding horror-movie scratches above. The final movement features the “God music” in which the quartet is joined by music from crystal glasses.

Which makes the transition into the next work, a studio version of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in Alium” rearranged for overdubbed string quartet, slightly less bewildering than it appears on paper. I talked a lot with singer friends about this performance when I was in college; the concept of a string quartet playing 40 different parts from one massive score was as novel to us as, I suspect, the existence of the motet itself. (I grew up on classical radio, but even our relatively cerebral channels WGH (and subsequently WHRO) played very little repertoire that was older than Bach.)

Is the Kronos adaptation of the motet successful? I’d have to say it’s mixed. Certainly the depth of sound from the overdubbed strings is powerful, but nowhere near as impactful as a performance with choir. The studio magic that Kronos employed did not extend to creating the spatial illusion of being surrounded in a cathedral with eight vocal quintets, which is much of the “shock and awe” of the original motet. But it does powerfully convey the sense of colossal loss that seems to underlie so many of Tallis’s works, as a crypto-Catholic at the court of the King of England.

“Doom. A Sigh” is in another space entirely, but maintains the thread of lament. Here the quartet seems to play mostly ambient or electrically amplified sounds, accompanying field recordings of folk songs from Hungary made by the composer István Márta that speak of the loss of the nation’s traditions under Communist rule.

The performance on Black Angels rarely lapses into irony, which makes the one exception, Charles Ives’ “They Are There!,” all the more striking. Accompanying a recording of Ives playing and singing his own composition, the effect of the piece appears to be to skewer the patriotism of the call to war that appears in the text of the work. One interpretation is that Ives, a pacifist, could “get fightin’ mad about his pacifism.” As a teenager coming out of the Reagan years of the Cold War, I tended to interpret Ives’ performance, recorded during the height of World War II, through a heavy lens of irony, keenly aware as I was of the cost of the massive military machine that kept the state of war simmering for more than forty years. Now that we know the cost of the fascism that the troops were fighting at the time, and have seen its resurgence in the last ten years, the ironic reading feels less true for me.

The record closes with a performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, which has been variously interpreted as being dedicated to the victims of fascism (a dedication endorsed and perhaps applied by the official Soviet regime on the quartet’s publication in 1960) and to an overwhelmed soul who contemplated suicide. The work pulls together all the threads from the other works, including threnodic passages that point back (forward?) to “Black Angels,” the requiem-like sadness of the opening movement, and an overwhelming sense of dread and loss.

The overall impact of Black Angels can be overwhelming, but it is highly recommended. After several albums of commissioned works, it earned the quartet many awards and nominations, and put Kronos firmly on the map as an essential, innovative ensemble, a reputation that the quartet would continue to re-earn through the following decade. That’s especially true with the album that we’ll review next week.

You can listen to the album here:

Kronos Quartet, Music of Bill Evans

Album of the Week, March 4, 2023

Over the albums of the past few weeks we’ve listened to the Bill Evans Trio play an assortment of covers and original Evans compositions. Today’s record pays tribute to Evans the composer—with help from of his collaborators—in an unusual form: the string quartet.

Violinist David Harrington formed the Kronos Quartet in Seattle in 1973, but soon relocated to San Francisco and the classic line-up—John Sherba on second violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Jean Jeanrenaud on cello—was in place by 1978. The group focused on modern repertoire but did not limit itself to classical music, and its second major label release was 1985’s Monk Suite: Kronos Quartet Plays Music of Thelonious Monk, featuring arrangements by Tom Darter and guest appearances by Ron Carter and Chuck Israels on bass. The album was a surprise hit, and the group followed it in 1986 with Music of Bill Evans, which also featured arrangements by Darter and guest appearances by Eddie Gómez and by guitarist Jim Hall. In another connection to Evans, the record was produced by Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews.

The arrangements throughout begin as transcriptions of the original trio performances, then branch out to add some solo opportunities for members of the quartet and their guests. The solos by Gómez on “Waltz for Debby” and “Very Early” shine brilliantly in this context, with a bite and snap on the opening number and a meditative glow on the second. A little seems lost in translation in the string solos in “Debby,” though, where the tone feels a little like a hoedown. One thing the quartet gets right in the opening number, though, is the fluidity of the time in the chorus, with the first rendition coming across as a bouncy swing and the second as a time-shifted, smeary triple rhythm.

“Nardis” is a showcase for Gómez, who takes the opening solo with some ferocity. The intensity diminishes a little with the entrance of the violin solo, but overall it’s a fine rendition of the Miles/Evans classic, particularly the finale. “Re: Person I Knew” captures the shifting harmonic colors of the Evans classic (anagrammatically named for Keepnews), with Jeanrenaud’s cello ably providing the melodic and harmonic grounding originally provided by Chuck Israels’ bass. Of all the performances here, it translates best to the quartet form.

“Time Remembered” is an exploration of the harmonic depths of Evans’ ballad playing. Hearing the string parts, one is tempted to go back and listen to the original recordings and revel in the newly clarified harmonies and chords, which sometimes seem to pass by too quickly and unremarked-upon in the trio recordings.

Jim Hall joins the quartet for the next three works: “Walking Up,” “Turn Out the Stars,” and “Fire.” As Keepnews writes in the liner notes, the outer two works of this “mini-suite” “could help destroy the myth that Evans was merely a master of slow tempos”; though the performance of “Walking Up” does not reach the velocity that Evans reached in his short-lived quartet with Jack DeJohnette, the energy is there, especially when Hall’s guitar begins to explore the harmonic complexities of the tune. “Turn Out the Stars,” by contrast, is a deeply introspective work, made all the more poignant by Hall’s unaccompanied, spontaneous closing solo in memory of his friend.

“Peace Piece” closes the album. The quartet unhurriedly explores this great work by Evans that would later be mined by Miles Davis for “Flamenco Sketches,” with the second violin, viola and cello sketching the hypnotically repeating chords of the left hand and Harrington playing a transcription of Evans’ right hand. Here again in the string transcription, the brilliant strangeness of Evans’ harmonic senses shine more clearly, giving us a better appreciation for the genius of his conception.

Though the recording succeeds brilliantly both at illuminating Evans the composer and the performer, this would be the last of the Kronos albums to be devoted entirely to jazz. In subsequent albums they would lean into the contemporary repertoire for string quartets. We’ll hear a particularly notable performance from them next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans, Montreux II

Album of the Week, February 25, 2023

It’s a little unfair to say that Bill Evans’ best albums were recorded in the 1960s. He had a productive decade in the 1970s, recording for Columbia, Milestone and Fantasy. But his most enduring compositions were written in the 1960s. We’ve already heard many of them; they continued to feature on the many live albums he recorded during the decade. Picking up a Bill Evans recording from the 1970s, therefore, the odds were that it was live and covered familiar ground… mostly.

Much of Evans’ creativity during these years, ultimately, was in his interpretation and in his song choices. Both elements are broadly on display in Montreux II, Evans’ second live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival and his final recording for producer Creed Taylor, this time on Taylor’s own CTI label.

We’re going to hear a lot more about CTI in coming weeks (spoiler alert!), but in this early stage of evolution the label was a bright cross-section of straight ahead jazz, proto-jazz-funk, and some reasonably out-there avant-garde stuff. Consider that the first recorded artists in the CTI 6000 series included flautist Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard in an early jazz-funk masterpiece, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joe Farrell, and this Evans date. There is, however, very little of the hallmarks of the classic CTI period here – no big string section orchestrated by Don Sebesky, no jazz-funk, very little in the way of nods to popular music. There’s just the Bill Evans Trio, doing what they did best.

This incarnation of the trio saw Jack Dejohnette (who had left to join Miles following At the Montreux Jazz Festival) with drummer Marty Morell, who would work with Evans and bassist Eddie Gómez from 1968 to 1974. Morell brought steady support and a solid presence behind the kit; while his level of creativity was not as high as Dejohnette, his fills and statements were more assertive than those that Paul Motian, for instance, had brought to some of the earlier trio recordings.

The tone, overall, is jubilant. Evans was playing in an extroverted manner here (relatively speaking). Tempos are brighter and even the ballads have the hint of a smile at the corner of their mouths, metaphorically speaking. The repertoire, as noted above, is a combination of familiar Evans compositions (“Very Early,” “34 Skidoo,” “Peri’s Scope”), covers of well loved favorites (“How My Heart Sings,” “I Hear a Rhapsody,” “Israel”), and a surprise. Starting in the 1970s Evans began to turn toward modern pop songs for repertoire, and this record features a surprisingly tender cover of the 1966 Bacharach/David hit “Alfie.” The first half of the ballad is entirely Evans and Gómez, but Morell joins them for a rhythmically jubilant verse before the trio returns to the more contemplative tone of the opening, with Gómez’s bass providing propulsive energy under the melody. It serves as a blueprint for the whole album.

One of the saddest questions we must ask about Evans’ career is where he would be without his crippling heroin addiction. Unlike past addicts we’ve seen like Philly Joe Jones, John Coltrane, and others, Evans was always careful not to let his habit interfere with his performances or his studio work (except for one memorable occasion when he accidentally hit a nerve with the needle and had to play largely one-handed for a week), but it clearly became an escape for him, and one that was only replaced by cocaine or alcohol on the brief occasions when he managed to get off the drug, from the time he got hooked in 1958 to his death in 1980. It has been described as the “slowest suicide in history,” and there’s no doubt that it interfered with his compositional creativity. But throughout that incredible ear remained as the hallmark of this most sensitive pianist. And his work remains as an influential milestone on jazz, one that a variety of unlikely musicians would pay tribute to after his death. We’ll hear one of those recordings next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans, At the Montreux Jazz Festival

Album of the Week, February 18, 2023

Bill Evans played in plenty of other formats than the piano trio. We first met him in this column as part of Miles Davis’ sextet. He also recorded with symphonic orchestra, backing up Herbie Mann and Don Eliott, and solo. But piano trio was by far his favorite configuration, and one can trace a lot of his development as a musician by listening to how his playing responds to changes of personnel in his trios over the years. We’ve heard some of those changes already, but none were more significant than the change of players heard on this recording.

Chuck Israels, who played bass in the trio off and on from 1962 to early 1966, was gone; his last recording (save a one-off 1975 date) with Evans was the 1966 Bill Evans at Town Hall concert. And Larry Bunker’s last recording with the trio was last week’s Trio ’65. In their places were two significant musicians who would play pivotal roles in Evans’ development.

Evans met bassist Eddie Gómez in 1966, when the latter was just 22 years old and recently graduated from Juilliard. The bassist would spend the next 11 years working with Evans, forming far and away the pianist’s longest lasting musical partnership. But Evans was to record with a rotating chair at drummer for several years, doing a few albums with Shelly Manne, another duo album with Jim Hall in the mode of Undercurrent, and a solo recording. Finally in 1968, Evans met the young drummer Jack DeJohnette, who was just coming off a celebrated stint as a member of Charles Lloyd’s quartet.

The galvanic impact that DeJohnette had on Evans’s sound can be heard from the opening tune, “One for Helen,” where the drummer’s sound seems to spur Evans to greater harmonic and rhythmic innovation. While the opening tempo and dynamic is already more extroverted than the performances on the preceding trio records, the excitement ratchets up another notch with the entrances of Gómez and DeJohnette. For one thing, the drummer’s fills are noticeable here, instead of genteelly blending in as did Motian’s, with small explosions on cymbal or snare bursting from the line from time to time. Gómez gets a lion’s share of the excitement, though, with a bass solo that manages to be both melodic and percussive at once. When Evans re-enters, he’s recharged, playing rhythmic variations back to back into the close of the tune.

“A Sleepin’ Bee” retains some of the introspective hush of the performance on Trio 64, but Gómez and DeJohnette enliven it with their first entrance. Gómez’s entrance neatly echoes the descending left hand line in the piano before taking voice with a countermelody, while DeJohnette drops bombs and underscores the melodic exploration with rolls, excursions on the tom, and other outbursts, all while keeping a proverbial eye on Evans. The bass solo in the back half of the track is a neat trick, being both fully metrically and harmonically aligned with Evans’ take on the tune while simultaneously opening up the sound world of the piece with different chord voicings.

Earl Zindars’ “Mother of Earl” is a quieter ballad, here given a somber introduction by Evans that gives way to a more deliberate statement of the melody, and an extended bass solo in triplets. DeJohnette’s drums are mostly limited here to atmosphere, with some gentle work on the cymbals throughout.

Where things really start to get into gear is “Nardis.” Composed by Miles, the tune found its way into Evans’ repertoire in 1958 while he was playing in Cannonball Adderley’s band. First appearing on a Bill Evans Trio record with 1961’s Explorations, it remained a highlight of his live shows for the rest of his career, and this performance is a key argument for why. The performance here ably represents the model that so many preceding and subsequent takes would follow: a “straight” reading of the chorus by the full band, followed by an extended solo, here given to Gómez. In the liner notes to the album, the bassist notes that he views his instrument as a horn, and the solo here bears that out as an extended meditation on the tune. Evans follows with his own solo, picking up the rhythmic drive of Gómez’s bass line, as splashes on the cymbals and rolls on the snare and tom pour kerosene on the fire. DeJohnette then gets his own solo and takes some of the fill devices into a free exploration of time and tonality, wringing new colors out of the drum kit and revising the melody in a sort of slow motion fog before roaring back in a blistering crash of cymbals. The band close out with a recapitulation of the melody, trying on four closing chords before running up the scale and into the applause of the audience.

“I Loves You, Porgy” finds Evans catching his proverbial breath, taking a solo exploration of the tune that is by turns introspective and extroverted. Starting about two minutes in, the free chordal explorations of the opening give way to a syncopated rhythm that seems to light up the keys under the pianist’s fingers, spurring an exploration of the tune in rhythm that lasts through most of the rest of the piece. The next track, “The Touch of Your Lips,” is in a similarly introspective mood until Gómez and DeJohnette rejoin about halfway through, when the temperature kicks up again.

“Embraceable You” is a solo feature for Gómez, who freely explores the colors and range of the bass with soft accompaniment from Evans and DeJohnette. Evoking by turns the sound of a Spanish guitar, a Miles Davis solo line, and the most swinging bass line ever played by Milt Hinton, the bassist plays a sweetly introspective version of the tune, ending with rapt applause from the Montreux festival crowd.

Evans’ version of “Someday My Prince Will Come” is far less wistful than the version we last heard from Miles’ group (with Wynton Kelly on piano). If Miles’s version is hopeful, Evans’ version is positively jubilant. Gómez takes an extended bass solo in the lower range of the instrument, and DeJohnette trades eights with Evans, until finally the band crashes through the finale and the festival crowd goes wild. Evans and company return for a romp through “Walkin’ Up” at a breakneck pace to close out, leaving the audience roaring for more.

DeJohnette wouldn’t stay long with Evans, despite the sound the trio developed (which won Evans his second Grammy award). He played with Stan Getz briefly in November 1968, and was performing with Getz’s group at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London that month when he was discovered by Miles Davis. He went on to Miles’ band, performing alongside bassist Dave Holland in what has been dubbed the “lost” quintet, since none of that line-up’s music ever made it onto a studio recording. As for Evans, he would continue in the trio format, and we’ll hear one more outing from his trio next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans Trio, Trio ’65

Album of the Week, February 11, 2023

Bill Evans didn’t record much in 1964—he was too busy touring. Aside from a studio session with Stan Getz, Ron Carter (alternating with Richard Davis) and Elvin Jones, his only recorded output from the year was a session with singer Monica Zetterlund (appearing under her name as Waltz for Debby) and live sessions in California and Europe. None of those sessions included Gary Peacock, whose contributions to Evans’ catalog began and ended with Trio 64. Instead, Evans was back touring with Chuck Israels and a new drummer, Larry Bunker.

The new album, which like its predecessor was recorded in one session in New York City, on February 3, 1965, follows a similar format: all standards, no originals, and more than a few numbers that Evans had recorded before. As for the players, we’ve met Israels before; Bunker is new to this column, but not to jazz. He had one of the most varied careers of a jazz drummer ever, having appeared on records over the course of his career for (deep breath): Peggy Lee including Black Coffee, Buddy Collette, Stan Getz, Stan Kenton including A Merry Christmas!, Gary Burton, Chet Baker, Benny Carter, Clare Fischer, Woody Herman, Dizzy Gillespie, Plas Johnson, Johnny Mandel, Shelly Manne, Carmen McRae, Oliver Nelson, Paul Horn, Art Pepper, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo, Bud Shank, Lalo Schifrin, Sarah Vaughan, Wendy Waldman, the Fifth Dimension including Stoned Soul Picnic, Tim Buckley on Sefronia, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Franks, Diane Schuur, Kenny Rogers, Walter Murphy, Barry Manilow, Michael Bolton, Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, Diana Kraal, Cheryl Bentyne, Vince Gill, Robert Palmer, U2 (he is the timpani player on “Hawkmoon 269,” from Rattle & Hum), and Christina Aguilera, on My Kind of Christmas. A session drummer at heart, he nevertheless made six recordings with Evans, appearing on two Milestone sessions (Time Remembered and At Shelly’s Manne-Hole), the Zetterlund record, a live trio recording, and an odd session with symphony orchestra, in addition to Trio ’65.

The opener, “Israel,” is a fast moving modal blues that starts out swinging and then doubles down. Evans plays rapidly descending arpeggios in his first solo that are a little reminiscent of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Israels takes two solo choruses, and Bunker takes a solo chorus and then trades eights for a bit with Evans, echoing some of the rhythms from the pianist’s solo along the way.

“Elsa” is a classic Bill Evans Trio ballad, with Israels leveraging the suspended note on the 5th to good effect in his introduction. The arrangement moves in a sort of shuffling waltz, with brisk patterns on Bunker’s brushes surrounding Evans and Israel’s playing like a filigree. Throughout, Israels alternates a simple underpinning of the chords with a more elaborate descending bass line that reinforces the melody, switching with Evans seemingly telepathically.

This version of “Round Midnight” plays the much-loved and oft-played Thelonious Monk standard in an intimate, but not simple arrangement. Indeed, the trio seems to manifest all the parts of a more elaborate quintet performance among themselves. Israel’s playing in the middle choruses takes more and more prominence until it seems to spontaneously morph into a bass solo.

“Love is Here to Stay” is an unsentimental but jovial romp through the old Gershwin standard. Ella Fitzgerald may have done the definitive version of this tune in her Song Books, but she’d need to hold onto her hat to keep up with the trio here. The effective use of space in the arrangement of the chorus and the outro that shifts the song into a different key are both worth listening for.

“How My Heart Sings” is a brisk reprise of the title song from his earlier Riverside session. Here you can really hear the difference made by Bunker’s contribution to the trio’s sound, his brisk snare and hi-hat work urging Evans and Israels along. Israels is a particular delight on this track, with a lyrical bass melody under the chorus that sings. The whole track is over in less than three minutes.

“Who Can I Turn To” is a contemplative ballad, with Evans taking the first chorus out of time before a transition into a swinging second verse. The transition between verses hangs suspended in harmony each time, as Israels pauses on the fifth before dropping back down to underpin the chords. Evans shifts both time, moving rhythmically around the chords, and harmony in his solo.

“Come Rain or Come Shine” begins as a more melancholy iteration of the group dynamic from the prior track, but where “Who Can I Turn To” eventually finds a sunny mood, here the clouds stay stubbornly overhead. Minor key aside, Israels’ solo here is almost as brilliant as his subtle playing behind Evans; the pizzicato chords he plays ever so slightly out of time behind Evans in the intro to the last verse are stunning.

“If You Could See Me Now” becomes a showcase for the trio as they shift the rhythmic emphasis of the tune with each verse, keeping the chord progressions the same but playing swung eighth notes in one iteration, legato runs in another, marcato progressions in the third, and on for each evolution of the tune. Each verse seems to turn the kaleidoscope another fraction, revealing new highlights in the tune.

Trio ’65 would be the penultimate album for this incarnation of the Evans trio; they would play together just once more on Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra. The trio we’ll hear next time has some fresh faces at both bass and drums who would bring new energy to Evans’ approach.

You can listen to the full album here:

Bill Evans, Trio 64

Album of the Week, February 4, 2023

Bill Evans was having a good year (or two) in 1962 and 1963. Following the sessions that produced Moon Beams and How My Heart Sings!, his contract was picked up by Verve Records, where Creed Taylor was still in full swing. He recorded a handful of additional sessions for Riverside in , including material that appeared on Interplay and on the great posthumous release Loose Blues. He then started his Verve recording career in two sessions as a sideman, one backing West Coast drummer Shelley Manne and one with the Gary McFarland Orchestra. He recorded a set of solo piano sessions, with overdubs, that became the Grammy award winning Conversations with Myself. And he played on some clunkers of albums with orchestra, performing current movie themes (hey, nobody’s perfect).

But he was never too far from his trio. In mid-1963 he recorded live sessions with Chuck Israels and Paul Motian at Manne’s club, “Shelly’s Manne-Hole,” that were later released on Milestone as Time Remembered. And on December 18, 1963, he entered Verve’s studios in New York City with Motian and the 28-year-old bassist Gary Peacock to record what would become Trio 64.

I haven’t been able to find any information to explain why these sessions had Peacock on bass, rather than Israels. The latter continued to work with Evans for several more years, as we’ll see in next week’s recording. And while Peacock went on to have a long career, recording many albums with Motian and (most notably) anchoring another piano trio, the famous Keith Jarrett Standards Trio with Jack DeJohnette, he only did this one session with Evans. (A possible reason: he went on to join Miles Davis’ band, but briefly, in early 1964.) But because Peacock did record this session, we have a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the difference that his style makes in Evans’ trio. Answer: not much, and a lot.

One thing you’ll hear immediately in the performances is that Peacock’s bass has a woodier, more percussive sound, possibly due to Taylor’s production choices. But Peacock also performs, on this outing, much more like a traditional bassist, anchoring the bottom of the harmonies rather than the more vocal-style countermelodies that Israels provided. In this trio, Evans was fully in charge, and there’s less of the give and take that characterizes his performances with Israels.

The repertoire on the album is also slightly unusual. Unlike the last sessions for Riverside, which featured Evans’ own compositions alongside standards from the Song Book, this album is entirely comprised of standards, albeit a few that are a little less than standard. For instance, the opening track — the theme to the “Little Lulu” cartoon shorts from Paramount that aired between 1943 and 1948 — has rarely been heard in other jazz contexts. And the trio’s performance of J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” reminds us that, as I’ve written before, most memorable 20th century Christmas songs are not only de facto part of the Great American Song Book, they’re often by Song Book songwriters.

Trio 64 is overall an engaging, even-keeled listen. While I don’t consider it essential in the way its predecessor albums are, it’s still fun—buoyant, even. Sadly, it was to be Paul Motian’s last performance with the trio. We’ll hear from a different incarnation of the group next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans Trio, How My Heart Sings!

Album of the Week, January 28, 2023

Producer Orrin Keepnews said in the liner notes to Bill Evans’ How My Heart Sings, “This project was the first time I had set out to record two albums by the same group at the same time,” referring to the album of ballads that came from these same sessions, Moon Beams. The theory behind this album was a set of more up-tempo songs to accompany the unusual all-ballads format of the accompanying recording. As Evans himself noted, “the selections presented here are primarily of the ‘moving’ kind, though there is in the trio’s approach to all material the desire to present a singing sound.”

Whatever you call it, this second recording from the May 1962 sessions, not issued until January 1964, is unusually buoyant. But it’s not extroverted; it rings with a quieter joy. You can hear it from the beginning, where Evans opens Earl Zindars’ “How My Heart Sings” with a gentle swing that leans against the syncopation of Chuck Israels’ bass. Drummer Paul Motian is a little more present here than on Moon Beams, underscoring the shift from 3/4 to 4/4 in the second chorus, but he still stays mostly in the background, setting the stage for the dialog between Evans and Israels.

“I Should Care” leans into the rhythm harder, with Motian swinging against Evans through several choruses before falling back behind Israels’ solo. Here the bassist underscores Evans’ point about really singing the line, as the solo is lyrical and all melody. Evans plays with the beat throughout this one, shifting emphasis to the second and fourth beats, especially in the last chorus.

We’ve heard Dave Brubeck’s great standard “In Your Own Sweet Way” before, but here Evans puts his own stamp on the tune, taking it faster and playing with the beat in the bridge, then briefly departing from the gentle swing of the original into a racing second melody, as though bursting into a second song in the middle of a first. Chuck Israels’ solo takes the melody down into the bass depths and fragments it further; when Evans steps alongside him he tosses the fragments back and forth with the bassist as they go.

“Walking Up” is an Evans original, with more than a little of the feel of John Coltrane’s “Countdown,” from Giant Steps. But when he turns the corner (or maybe reaches the landing?) we’re suddenly in a different environment. Perhaps we’ve walked to the top of a bridge and that’s a ray of sun peeking through the fog? At any rate, we’re playing with meter again, moving from straight four into a syncopated off-beat, and it’s fascinating.

If you’re going to play “Summertime” and make it your own, you’d better have some good ideas to share. The version on this record, again, shares some DNA with a Coltrane recording, in this case the version of the great Gershwin tune on My Favorite Things. Both recordings feature a rhythmic motif around the modal suspension underpinning the verse, but where Trane’s version has the beat in McCoy Tyner’s piano, here it’s given to Chuck Israels, who opens the track with the motif and never puts it down. Evans’ version swings more than Trane’s, due in large part to Motian’s skillful fills. This is probably the one track where Motian steps out of the background and you can really hear all of the things he’s got bubbling away under the others.

“34 Skidoo” is the second of three Evans originals on the album, and the jauntiest by far. Sliding in and out of different meters, Evans and Israels take turns syncopating the tune and perform some incredible handoffs between their turns at the wheel. The momentum continues through Cole Porter’s “Ev’rything I Love”; the tune leans closer toward ballad status than most of the numbers in this set, but when Evans comes out of the first chorus he takes lyrical flight.

“Show-Type Tune” brings us out with another Evans composition. A wistful opening on the piano is followed by a metaphorical “squaring of the shoulders” and a more forthright, lyrical verse. The most extroverted performance on the album, the track features Evans pulling out trick after trick in his solo, shifting chromatic scales at the end, and seemingly taking flight at the end. It is a heck of a closing number from such a deeply introverted performer.

The two albums recorded during the May 1962 sessions re-established Evans as a force to be reckoned with, and put a capstone on his time with Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside Records. The following year saw him move to Verve and producer Creed Taylor, where he would make some deeply original recordings — as well as a fair amount of dreck. We’ll hear some of the more original and less drecky work next time.

You can listen to the album here:

The Bill Evans Trio, Moon Beams

Album of the Week, January 21, 2023

Jazz musicians are often inspired by playing with particular colleagues. Arguably neither Dave Brubeck nor Paul Desmond ever excelled individually the records that they made together. And Miles’ great quintets were defined by the partnership the trumpeter made with saxophonists John Coltrane, then Wayne Shorter. But Bill Evans was inspired by his bassists—first and most famously Scott LaFaro, then following his death with Chuck Israels. It is that collaboration that brings this, the first proper record of the new trio with Israels and drummer Paul Motian, to life.

Evans and his trio entered the Sound Makers Studio in New York on Thursday, May 17, 1962, three days after his second and final session with Jim Hall for Undercurrent was recorded in the same studio. They cut four tunes that day, of which “If You Could See Me Now” appeared on this record. They returned on May 29, June 2, and June 5. The bulk of today’s record was recorded in the June 2 session, along with the more balladic material recorded across the other three dates.

“Re: Person I Knew” is an opening statement that is shrouded in modal mystery. Displaying several Evans hallmarks off the bat, including the out of time entrance, the yearning of the modal pivot between the G minor and D minor, and even the cryptic title (an anagram of the name of the producer who had spurred him to reform his trio, Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews). And then there’s the playing of the trio. After the solo statement in the first eight bars by Evans, Israels makes his presence known with a bass line that keeps time while sketching out the space around the open fifth and octaves. Motian’s understated but complex drum fills keep the whole thing moving forward as Evans and Israels breathe, listen to each other, make statements. It’s a powerful performance.

“Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” which lends the album its title, returns to a more normal and less modal tonality, but Evans and Israels continue their duet. Following the first statement of the chorus, Israels begins a complex countermelody that underpins the entire remainder of the song. The conclusion has him bring the tune to an unusually irresolute finish, descending to a relative minor.

“I Fall In Love Too Easily,” the great dark Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne ballad, here drives headlong into the darkness and comes out blinking into the light of a major key. The transition is so gradual that you hardly notice it’s happened until the end, where the pianist underscores the major with a few bars that seem almost like a dance before resolving to the final major chord.

“Stairway to the Stars” is lights down, swaying to the music after midnight, with only Motian’s insistent drum pattern nudging things on away from slumber. Thus roused, Evans plays a rhapsodic variation on the theme over a high obligato in Israels’ bass. The coda, which returns to the feeling of out of time, brings the first side to a close.

Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now” opens the second side, with Evans treating the tune as a more straightforward ballad for the initial chorus, then gently swinging into a syncopated restatement of the theme. The interplay between Israels and Evans here is striking and almost telepathic, with the pianist taking a breath as the bassist enters with a chord change or plays the first note of the next verse.

“It Might As Well Be Spring” begins as a yearning statement then seems to take flight, as Evans brings the melody through two choruses and then into a third that almost seems like it’s in double time. Throughout Israels maintains a sort of running commentary that turns outright sly at the end, where after the final chord he seems as though he is playing the beginning of “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”) before continuing the downward run one more note.

Jerome Kern’s “In Love In Vain” carries the melancholy burden of being from the last show he worked on before his 1946 death, the musical film Centennial Summer, which also featured “Up with the Lark,” another perennial Evans favorite. Again the dialog between Israels and Evans borders on the telepathic, with the heroic final chorus in particular a stunning example of their collaboration.

The last track, “Very Early,” is the second Evans original on the album, and one that was destined to appear in his setlists for the rest of his life. The tune is in playful Evans mode, as it circles the tone center while keeping things major throughout. Israels’ solo is worth a second listen, as he does some harmonic things that lend an unexpected depth to the musical structure while keeping up a dancing rhythm throughout.

Where some of Evans’ earlier work could be so delicate as to seem tentative, there is joy that rings from these sessions, a feeling of surety and confidence. The album seems to announce that Evans is back, and better than ever; the partnership with Israels was off to a good start.

One interesting side note: another memorable album cover here, with a beautiful model in a provocatively romantic pose. The model is none other than Nico, some five years before her Andy Warhol inspired turn as chanteuse on the Velvet Underground’s debut. Like Evans, there’s more than a hint of sadness behind her smile here.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans and Jim Hall, Undercurrent

Album of the Week, January 14, 2023

In April 1962, Bill Evans was still digging out from under the emotional burden of Scott LaFaro’s death, but at least he was recording. After Orrin Keepnews persuaded him to return to the studio with Herbie Mann in late 1961, he was intermittently in and out of the studio in various contexts — a brief session with the new trio that wouldn’t see the light of day until 2007, a recording with Todd Dameron’s orchestra, a solo session. And on April 24, he entered the Sound Makers Studio in New York City to record with a new collaborator, guitarist Jim Hall.

Hall had built a reputation in the late 1950s in the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, and went on to collaborate with a number of musicians in the following years, including Dave Brubeck’s long-time collaborator Paul Desmond, and Sonny Rollins (that’s Hall on Rollins’ The Bridge). Along the way he had appeared opposite Evans when the latter was in Tony Scott’s quartet, and with the Giuffre Trio opposite Evans in Miles’ band in a run of dates at Café Bohemia in 1958. (Hall recalls, “Miles would tease that our silly little trio would get more applause than his group.”)

The two men got together to toss around some ideas in Evans’ New York apartment, and then headed into the studio, recording the album on April 24 and May 14, bracketing the final recording session for Nirvana with Herbie Mann and the Evans trio. What happened in the studio is an example of jazz alchemy. The two players throughout listen to each other intently, trading melodic ideas and completing each others’ harmonic sentences.

The version of “My Funny Valentine” that opens the album shows off the duo’s musical imagination. Far removed from the meditative flavor of Miles’ various interpretations of the tune, the two take the tune at a breakneck speed that shows off the interplay between the two. In the first chorus, Evans takes the lead, but Hall’s accompaniment anticipates the chord changes up the scale, practically pulling Evans up after him! After the first chorus, things start to breathe a little more, with both Evans and Hall leaving rests in their solos between ideas, as though punctuating a conversation.

The second track, “I Hear a Rhapsody,” likewise flips around the convention established by John Coltrane and others who had covered this unlikely jazz standard. Where Coltrane’s recording takes a brisk pace, Hall and Evans meditate on the tune, with Hall’s guitar setting the pace via an out of tempo introduction that settles into a 60bpm reverie. Again, Evans and Hall exchange ideas in a way that seems psychic.

“Dream Gypsy” continues the trance, this time in a waltz. There is more than a hint of “Blue in Green” in the introduction, but rather than heading into modal bliss, this first performance of the lovely Judith Veevers tune settles into a dark mode with flavors of Spanish guitar.

The opening of the second side, Jim Hall’s “Romain” sounds as though it should be “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” before it turns a corner, and changes key. There’s still a tinge of the Cole Porter number in the song, but the melody circles around G minor, as though reluctant to leave, before returning to C major, not quite performing the “major to minor” transition from the earlier song. It’s bewitching, and the duo keeps the tempo moving so that the end effect is bluesy rather than lugubrious.

John Lewis’ “Skating in Central Park” likewise has a touch of the familiar about it, but the genial waltz sweeps you along too ingratiatingly to worry about where you might have heard a bit of it before, circling the proverbial pond until it reaches a final climactic chord.

“Darn That Dream” continues in much the same key as “Central Park,” but freely, with a short introduction by Evans yielding to an unaccompanied solo by Hall. The performance has the feel of the best of Bill Evans, that quiet moment where the chords give way into a moment of transfiguration. He was to find that transcendent quality in the next recording project he did, which would see him return to the studio with his new trio; we’ll hear from them next week.

A note on the cover: that’s a photograph from a 1947 Harper’s Bazaar shoot by fashion photographer Toni Frissell at Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida. The tourist attraction, known for its live “mermaids,” is still in operation today.

You can listen to the album here:

Herbie Mann and the Bill Evans Trio, Nirvana

Album of the Week, January 7, 2023

Bill Evans—whom we last saw providing compositions and historic accompaniment for Miles on Kind of Blue—was putting things back together. On June 25, 1961, he and his trio—Paul Motian on drums and Scott LaFaro on bass—performed a legendary set at the Village Vanguard club in New York City, from which the famed albums Live at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby were drawn. The trio was making a name for Evans’ innovative, dreamy compositions and for the unusual equality of voice among the three players in the trio, particularly with Scott LaFaro’s bass playing. Then, on July 6, 1961, LaFaro was killed in a car crash on US 20 in Seneca, New York. Evans was bereft, playing nothing but his and LaFaro’s version of “I Loves You, Porgy” for days and pausing all performances.

By December 1961 Evans was recording again. Spurred by his producer and Riverside Records founder, Orrin Keepnews, he put his trio back together, this time bringing in the bassist Chuck Israels. Before the trio recorded any sessions for Riverside, though, they found themselves in the Atlantic Records New York studios December 8, 1961 with producer Nesuhi Ertegun and flautist Herbie Mann.

If you have been on the Internet for any length of time you’ve seen the listicles of bad 1970s album covers. One, Push Push, is especially memorable, showing a balding, shirtless man in a hairy-chested slouch with a flute over his shoulder. That’s Herbie Mann. But before he was recording (pretty good!) jazz-funk albums with eye-bleach-worthy covers, he was a straight ahead post bop jazz soloist and composer. So while the pairing of the two might sound odd on paper, on vinyl it makes a lot more sense.

The opening track, “Nirvana,” is a Mann original, but it opens up sounding a lot like a Bill Evans composition, as the trio introduces the chordal progression almost at a whisper, Evans exploring modes around the chords as Israels’ bass quietly marks the fifths. When Mann’s flute enters it’s as though he was whispering too, and his melody provides Chuck Israels with the moment to start exploring the tune independently. The dialog among the players is sensitive and you can almost see them listening to each other and nodding quietly as each introduces new ideas. The tune unfolds like breathing.

The mood continues with “Gymnopédie,” one of the rare jazz covers of the second of the Erik Satie compositions, instead of the more commonly encountered first. The trio introduces the theme and Evans and Mann take turns essaying the melody of the composition. It’s a gentle meditation and true to the original composition, which depending on your inclination is either refreshing or slightly stultifying. Interestingly, though it sounds like a continuation of the first track, “Gymnopédie” and the final tune “Cashmere” were actually recorded at a different session in May of 1962.

“I Love You” changes things up, with the players digging into the faster tempo of the Cole Porter song and Mann’s flute ringing in a higher register. On the second chorus, Evans drops out and we hear just Mann, Motian and Israels, which seems to spur Mann’s improvisatory muscles. By the time the players reach the end of the tune, all are fully engaged, with Israels’ stretto in the accompaniment no less exciting than his solo passage, one of only two on the record.

“Willow Weep for Me” is back in ballad territory, and here the weakness of the record reveals itself: Herbie Mann is not that compelling a ballad player. He largely sticks to the melody or to very close improvisation around it, and while he tries to find the bluesier corners in Ann Ronell’s legendary tune, it’s ultimately not a compelling exercise. Evans finds more interesting things in the melody but ultimately this track is a little flat. “Lover Man” is better. The tempo is up just a touch, but more importantly Mann is more engaged, his improvisation and statement of the melody more compelling.

“Cashmere,” closing the album, is another Mann original and the trio digs into it, finding a slightly off-kilter syncopation in the accompanying line under Mann’s first statement of the melody. Mann’s subsequent improvisation picks up the syncopation and makes it central to his interpretation of the tune, and when he hands it back to Evans the latter’s chorus is sprightly and sly, zigging from corner to corner. Israels’ solo (here’s the other one!) digs into the silence between the melody lines and also into the syncopation, trying a one-note variation of the syncopation pattern over three bars as though leaning into the groove. His solo is supported by Motian’s unshowy but brilliant drumming, which quietly anchors each pulse of the entire album. The band’s returning statement brings the tune through several modes before closing on a final suspension.

Mann and Evans wouldn’t record again, but Evans would go on to make some essential records with his trio. We’ll hear some of them soon, but first we’ll hear another unusual record in his discography that he began recording between the December and May dates for Nirvana. Come back next week for more on that record.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Ella Fitzgerald, Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas

Album of the Week, December 31, 2022

Every family has their holiday musical traditions. Many play the Vince Guaraldi A Charlie Brown Christmas album (we do, a lot). Some might play the Partridge Family Christmas album (we don’t, at all). But a tradition that Lisa and I discovered in the late 1990s, when it was reissued on CD, was Ella Fitzgerald’s first Christmas album.

I was thinking the other day about why jazz Christmas albums work so well. My conclusion: there’s a whole lot of Christmas songs that are really just Great American Songbook numbers, most of them from the same writers as those august luminaries. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”? Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, who also gave us “You Go to My Head.” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, of “The Trolley Song” (both from the musical Meet Me in St. Louis). “What Are You Doing New Years’ Eve?” is a Frank Loesser song, who also wrote “Slow Boat to China,” “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” and the songs for the Hans Christian Anderson musical, among many others. And that’s just picking three tracks from the first side of this album…

The 1960 recording session for Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas came at a propitious time in Ella’s career. As we noted in reviewing Ella and Duke at the Côte D’Azur, she was in the middle of recording her Song Book series, each release of which celebrated a particular composer of the Great American Songbook. In 1960, she had just released the George and Ira Gershwin volume the year before, which followed the Irving Berlin volume from 1958, the Duke Ellington volume in 1957, and both the Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter volumes in 1956. Accordingly, the selection here features six numbers from Song Book composers (side 1 ends with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” by Bob Wells with Mel Tormé; on side 2, there’s also Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”). But there are also numbers from other sources, including Leroy Anderson’s great “Sleigh Ride,” Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (surely the most durable 20th century song based on a Montgomery Wards advertising mascot!), “Frosty the Snowman,” Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith’s “Winter Wonderland,” and even Count Basie’s “Good Morning Blues,” which here receives its definitive 20th century performance. (The 21st century crown for this number might go to Cécile McLorin Salvant with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.)

And then there’s “Jingle Bells.” It may be the oldest tune on the album, but Ella and arranger/conductor Frank DeVol give J. S. Pierpont’s most famous contribution a mighty workout. This is the one tune on the recording where Ella really lets fly with the jazz swing vocals she is most famous for, culminating with the absolutely bonkers declaration at the end, “I’m just crazy ‘bout horses!” Us too, Ella.

The arrangements throughout veer between relaxed and exuberant, swinging hard throughout, a characteristic shared by Ella’s songbook recordings. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to dub this a “missing” songbook recording, as it fits right in. It’s an absolute joy and one worth adding to your record collection.

Listen…

Robert Shaw Chorale, Joy to the World

Album of the Week, December 24, 2022

Last time we wrote about the Album of the Week, a little more than a week ago (so sue me!), we wrote about Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. There’s more than an indirect connection to this week’s Album of the Week from that recording; as I noted then, Waring gave Robert Shaw his first job, asking the newly minted graduate of Pomona College to assemble and train a glee club for him.

That was the first of a series of groups led by the young, charismatic musician, culminating in the 1990s in the Robert Shaw Festival Chorus, an invitational choir that assembled each summer for workshops with Shaw in France (and in which many choral musicians in my life, including John Liepold, Bruce Tammen, and Christine Goerke participated). But probably the best known of Shaw’s groups was the Robert Shaw Chorale, the artists behind today’s recording.

Shaw became legendary for his ability to take ordinary—especially amateur— musicians and get extraordinary performances from them. I recall him telling the Cathedral Choral Society when we sang under his direction, either in 1995 or 1999, that “choral music is like sex. Both are far too important to be left solely to professionals.” He meant that it was important to perform with skill but maybe more important to perform with sheer love of music.

That sheer love of music comes through in this recording. There aren’t elaborate arrangements or unusual repertoire on the album. Most of the tracks consist of a few verses of familiar hymns or carols; there are 25 different carols in just over 33 minutes represented here. And, while I don’t often commend albums for just listening, this is one that I wholeheartedly recommend putting on and just listening. Enjoy…

Side one, part 1:

Side 1, Part 2:

Side 2, Part 1:

Side 2, Part 2: