Some New Music on Live365

I've been swamped lately.  One of these days I'm going to get things right.  Or so says Mose Allison.  I have added an hour of music to my Live365 channel.  I started with a Mose Allison gem.  The rest are from albums that I purchased when I first began buying jazz records.  Here is a playlist:

1. Mose Allison/Days Like This/The Word from Mose Allison
2. Bill Evans Trio/Pensativa/Crosscurrents
3. Warne Marsh/Blues in G Flat/The Unissued Copenhagen Studio Session
4. Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane/Freight Trane/Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane
5. Kenny Burrell/ Midnight Blue/Midnight Blue
6. Zoot Sims/Jitterbug Waltz/Warm Tenor
7. Zoot Sims/You Go To My Head/Warm Tenor
8. Wes Montgomery/Come Rain or Shine/The Complete Riverside Recordings
9. Bill Evans/The Days of Wine and Roses/Affinity
10. Bill Evans/Blue and Green/Affinity

The Allison piece speaks for itself.  Crosscurrents, with Warne Marsh  Lee Konitz backing the Bill Evans Trio (Eddi Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums), was one of the albums that hooked me into jazz.  I follow it with Warne Marsh from an unissued recording that got issued.  

I bought a bunch of albums with Kenny Burrell on them after I saw Burrell in concert in Southern California.  Burrell and Trane is a great example.  But I think that Midnight Blue is one of those albums that ought to be at the top of the list.  The recording is superb, and the playing is transcendental.  From Discogs.com:

Bass - Major Holley  Congas - Ray Barretto  Drums - Bill English Tenor Saxophone - Stanley Turrentine

Zoot Sims' Warm Tenor was one of my first purchases, back in Jonesboro Arkansas when I was still mowing my parent's lawn.  That is about as revealing an album title as ever I saw.  From the All Music Guide: This quartet set with pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist George Mraz and drummer Mousie Alexander.  

I had a double album by Wes Montgomery.  I don't know for sure if this piece was on it, but it is a good sample of what I fell in love with.  If Zoot's horn was warm, Wes had about as warm a line as any guitar jazz man. Now that I think about it, I am sure that this was on the original album because I recorded it and played on the stereo at the liquor store where I worked.  My boss complained. 

I added a couple of pieces from Affinity, with Bill Evans and Toots Thielemans on harmonica.  Same trio as above, with Larry Schneider on horns.  This is just exquisite jazz. 

The Poetry of the Jazz Trio

What distinguishes jazz from all or almost all other music genres is its poetic dimension.  I mean "poetic" in the modern sense: a form of communication that says as much by what it doesn't say as by what it does, and that condenses whole volumes of thought and experience into a few subtle hints.  I recall a very early poem by e. e. cummings: 

Oh, the pretty birdy, O,
with his little toe, toe, toe!

You can imagine that toe, toe, toe, being tapped out on a piano.  Cummings wrote that when he was three years old.  O!  

Almost all jazz does that same trick.  We don't know what kind of bird it is, or how big it is, or what color it is.  But we can get the movement of the three claws and the impression that it makes on the child's imagination.  

Here is an example of what I am talking about.  

Abdullah Ibrahim/Duke 88/Yarona

There's not much of the bird in that.  But you have the whole bird nonetheless, and you appreciate what you have.  Of course, the undisputed master of the jazz trio was Bill Evans.  Evans was better than any other jazz man I have listened to at mastering subtly.  He is always engaged in a duet with silence, and the silence says as much as he says.  Here is a taste:

Bill Evans/Blue in Green/The Complete Riverside Recordings

 The closest thing to that kind of poetry in more recent jazz, perhaps, is the work of Brad Mehldau on his marvelous "Art of the Trio" albums.  Here is Mehldau's little birdy poem. 

Brad Mehldau/Black Bird/The Art of the Trio 1

If you are trying to build a decent jazz collection, get Yarona, and all four of Mehldau's Art of the Trio albums.  Aim for everything by Bill Evans.  And drop me a line. 

Bill Evans on Riverside

I finally rounded out my Bill Evans collection with The Complete Riverside Recordings. A lot of this music was already on my hard drive, but with the Verve and Fantasy boxes, I have by George got a lot of Bill Evans. I imagine this comes close to all the recordings made under his name, but I haven't bothered to check that yet.

I think that Evans stands as one of the gods of what might be the last heroic jazz age. It doesn't seem that any jazz man after the generation of Miles, Trane, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, etc., has been canonized (to mix theological metaphors) in the way that those giants were.This is not to address the question of whether any later artists deserve it or not. To address that question would be to plunge into very deep waters.

But Evans, I think, stands alone in a couple of respects. One is that he wasn't African-American. There is a school of thought that says that only Black jazzmen are really capable of the genius of the music. Evans is a problem for that school.

A second reason Evans stands alone is that he seems uniquely resistant to the currents in which other jazz giants were piloting their boats. I think it's true that Evans alone is never tempted by the new thing, or by fusion, or any other of the many movements into which all the others plunged at one time or another. This is not to say that his music doesn't change. But the changes depend almost completely on the musicians playing with him. Evans music seems to come solely from his own magnificent heart.

The trio was his natural format. Against a brilliant bass and drums, Evans essence is recorded. The Riverside collection documents his earlier period as leader. Here are a couple of samples from his first sessions in November of 1956. This was the first number he recorded at these sessions, a short solo:

Bill Evans/I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)/New Jazz Conceptions

And here is the first Bill Evans Trio, with Teddy Kotick on bass, and Paul Motian on drums.

Bill Evans/Speak Low/New Jazz Conceptions

If you haven't got the cash to land the Riverside box, shell out for New Jazz Conceptions. ps., the Riverside and Fantasy boxes are both available at eMusic, but it will soak up a lot of downloads.

Stephen Brown on Kind of Blue

I have been listening to Cecil Taylor today, and had intended to post something on his wonderfully challenging music, when I happened to glance at a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, my single favorite book review publication, and found "Finished Sketches," a review by Stephen Brown of Richard Williams' The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and the remaking of modern music. A review of a book about an album had the hair standing up on the back of my neck. Find a copy of this review and read it. It's the best short piece I have seen on KOB. Here is a sample from the article, transcribed by sight:

Listen to "Blue in Green". It's five-and-a-half minutes long. Coltrane doesn't even know he's supposed to be playing on the tune until Davis decides to include him right as the tape starts to roll. "Producer: Just you four guys on this, Miles? Miles: Five . . . (to Coltrane) No, you play." And then they play and improvise over an unusual ten-bar form which doesn't properly close but loops back on itself --with such beautiful ideas and exquisite control that you wonder why the piece hasn't entered into the classical repertory. I don't mean the tune -- I means this improvised performance of it. It should be copied note for note, nuance for nuance, and played in concert. It is one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century music.

I have written in praise of Evan's composition, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful songs in all of modern jazz. Brown speaks with more musical authority than I ever will, and with apparently as much love. It was delicious to get that little bit of information. That Trane plays into the subtlest fibers of the melody's heart with no preparation at other than hearing the beginning, that he didn't even know he was to put his horn in his mouth, that may constitute an argument for the existence of God that trumps a thousand years of philosophy and theology. Who or what but God could make a Coltrane? Or an Evans? I would add Miles, but Miles probably thought that God had stolen his seat.

I expect that many or most of my readers are well familiar with this album. But just in case someone isn't, or maybe doesn't have it handy right at this moment, here is the number. Listen to it now, knowing what we both know.

Miles Davis/Blue in Green/Kind of Blue

If you don't have the recording, by all means rush out and get it. Shove people out of the way if you have to. No, don't, but think about doing it. KOB is easy to get for pennies. I got mine years ago by joining a record club.

ps. If you click on the picture above, you will get a lot more. It includes Evans along with Trane, Cannonball, and Miles. It makes a good background image for my laptop. Oh, and it is taken at a 1958 date, a recording of '58 Miles.

The Two Pianos on Kind of Blue

Legend has it that Wynton Kelly was irritated when he showed up at Columbia Studios on March 2nd, 1959. Bill Evans was sitting at the piano. Miles had hired Kelly to replace Evans, who didn't stand up well to touring. One can understand. But I think that Evans probably had almost as much to do with the texture of Kind of Blue as Miles did. Evans was one of the jazz giants of the era, surely in the top ten. No one played or composed with such a combination of heart and mind, softly digging into the feeling of every cord. If you look up "introspective" in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of Bill Evans bending low over the keys. As a leader, he was almost exclusively devoted to the standard piano trio. One of the things that makes Kind of Blue so wonderful is that preserves that degree of concentration and sensitivity that marks the Bill Evans trios in the context of a sextet.

Wynton Kelly was not that kind of genius, but he was a damn fine piano player. Whereas Evans was always exploring, asking and answering questions, Kelly was a muscular dancer. He appears only on one cut, "Freddie the Freeloader" on KOB. But he falls right into the goove, exploring the space with as much sensitivity as anyone could ask.

Here is a nice piece from a Kelly disc, recorded a couple of weeks earlier.

Wynton Kelly/Keep It Moving (take 4)/Kelly Blue

It's a three horn arrangement: the other Adderley, Nat, on cornet, Bobby Jaspar on flugglehorn, and Trane's highschool buddy Benny Golson on tenor. Paul Chambers plays bass and Jimmy Cobb drums. Both would appear on KOB. I've got several Kelly recordings in my collection, including Kelly Great, Kelly at Midnight, and Full View. Kelly Blue is the pick of the litter.

Here's a very nice cut with Evans leading a larger than trio group. It was recorded in 1976, and the recording is superb. The bass buzzes and the drum has depth.

Bill Evans/Sweet Dulcinea/Quintessence

Harold Land plays tenor sax and Kenny Burrell is on guitar. Ray Brown no bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. This is the kind of music they play on the elevators in Heaven.

Best Jazz Compositions 2: Blue in Green

'Blue in Green', written by Bill Evans, gets a lot less attention than 'Round Midnight', but surely deserves as much. For shear lyrical beauty, I am not sure it can be bested. And I like it for the same reason as I like Monk's great standard. Despite it's origins in the "modal jazz" experiment of Miles Davis, there is nothing the least bit abstract about 'Blue in Green.' To play either of them is to conjure up the broken heart that never mends walking down the street that is always dark. But whereas 'RM' seems to be weaving a narrative, 'Blue in Green' is much more impressionistic. Even the title suggests as much. It is the palate of emotional colors rather than the details and forms that is primary.

Evans composed the piece for Miles, and it made its debut on Kind of Blue. I doubt that version can be bested. Here is how NPR tells the story:

Davis was at a musical peak in the 1950s and had been preparing the ideas that would become Kind of Blue for years. A year before the recording, Davis slipped Evans a piece of paper on which he'd written with the musical symbols for "G minor" and "A augmented."

"See what you can do with this," Davis said. Evans went on to create a cycle of chords as a meditative framework for solos on "Blue in Green."

I don't know enough about music to appreciate the specifics, but the story is part and parcel of the song when I listen. Here is a version recorded by Evans and his astonishing trio: Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums. The album is Portrait in Jazz.

It adds something to the hearing of this particular interpretation that Scott LaFaro died in an a car accident less than two years after recording this album. More significantly, his death came ten days after the Village Vanguard sessions that stand as Bill Evans' magnum opus. Jazz is rarely happy music. A lot of musical genres help us to see the beauty in the tragic side of human life. I think jazz maps out the geography of sadness with more detail and depth than any other music.

If you want a superb Christmas mixer disc, 'Round Midnight', followed by 'Blue in Green', is a very good start.

Bill Evans & Heroin

Bill Evans was my first jazz hero, largely because an English teacher at Arkansas State University introduced me to Evan's music while also introducing me to fine wine. Since then I have collected a lot of Evan's music, and there is a lot. Most of the recordings he made as leader were in the trio format. Evans made his mark as an introspective dowager, seeking the vein of true song inside any melody, and squeezing every last drop of it out. But Evans did a lot of recording. He was side man on some very important albums: Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, and Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else.

One Evans recording that deserves more credit that it gets is Loose Blues. It's easy to disregard it. I picked it up in grad school, and only learned when I unwrapped the album that the recording session was a mess. Evans put the session together because he need money for smack. Apparently everyone was grumpy. Everyone included Zoot Sims on tenor, Jim Hall on Guitar, Ron Carter on Bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. That's some pretty expensive grump.

Whatever demons were chewing away at Bill Even's soul, he could still play. And he could compose. All the compositions on the recording are his. This disc makes me wish he had done more quartets and quintets. A good sample is the first number, billevans-01-loosebloose.

Check it out, and then buy the album. You won' say I steered you wrong.