The series continues with a look at the great swing veteran Sid Weiss and three guys who are mostly overlooked, despite (or maybe because of) playing bass with famous big bands – Junior Raglin and Ernie Shepard with Duke Ellington, and Eddie Jones with Count Basie.
5. – Sid Weiss. If a soundtrack of The Swing Era was ever assembled, Sid Weiss would be playing bass on more than his fair share of it. He played with four key big …
I’d hoped to write some sort of Christmas post – a Yule blog, if you will – as in the past few years but a lot of time was taken up with, well…….. Christmas, so I didn’t get to it. At any rate, I hope everyone had a nice one, as I did.
Most of northern North America is caught in a deep cold snap and there’s been plenty of snow to boot – actually, to shovel* – so …
Turning 61 recently, I seem to have entered the early phase of my dotage. Some, such as Mrs. W., would argue it’s not that early, but quite advanced. This comes equipped with a certain amount of woolly forgetfulness and nostalgia, but even when not feeling the effects of these I’m noticing lately that treasured tracks from my long-lost youth have been coming back to me randomly. And at a furious pace, often abetted by free-associating YouTube clips exchanged in emails …
The Mike Murley Trio – Murley on soprano and tenor saxophones, Reg Schwager on guitar and yours truly on bass – played a concert on the evening of February 5 at The Fourth Stage, a newish performance space at The National Arts Centre in Ottawa. It was part of the city’s newly-founded Winter Jazz Festival, which in turn is part of its annual celebration of ice and snow, “Winterlude”. Although this year, “Interlude” might be more like it, as our …
Guitarist Jim Hall died well over a year ago, but I’m still in a state of mourning and semi-denial about it. For ages now, Hall has been an essential part of my jazz listening on reams of classic records with other great musicians. In countless settings, he delivered so many indelible, perfect little musical moments that I can scarcely believe he’s gone. Thankfully his prolific recorded legacy lives on, meaning I can bring him into my living room whenever I …
This week brought the momentous news that Gunther Schuller died of leukemia at age 89. He was most certainly one of the giants of twentieth-century American music and just as surely one of the most versatile and wide-ranging of musicians. His work from the late 1940s on as a composer of contemporary classical music alone guarantees his eminence, he’s in all the history texts on the subject and won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 orchestral work “Of Reminiscences and …
In 1971, Jimmy Rushing turned seventy and became terminally ill with leukemia. He’d been singing jazz professionally for almost fifty years, first leaving his native Oklahoma as an itinerant blues singer in the early twenties, eventually joining Jelly Roll Morton for a short spell in Los Angeles. He worked his way as far back east as Kansas City, getting in on the ground floor of the seminal, blues-based music teeming from that wide-open town. He sang with Walter Page’s Blue …
The term contrafact has gradually made its way into the jazz lexicon, establishing an increasingly firm toe-hold for itself in recent years. For those lucky enough not to be familiar with it, a “contrafact” is defined in jazz terms as “a composition created by overlaying a new melody line on the harmonic structure of a pre-existing song” – or put more simply, the borrowing of another song’s chord changes to create a new one.
I describe those not familiar …
The vast repertoire of jazz is mostly made up of two main streams: The Great American Songbook, which came from musical theatre or Tin Pan Alley, and songs or compositions that have come from within the ranks of jazz itself. While rumbling around among all these, it’s common to come across the same prolific contributors over and over again. The show-tune “big boys”, including Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and many others far …
It probably doesn’t speak well for my mental health, but often for no reason I can fathom, I wake up with a particular record deeply embedded in my mind and ears. Almost as though it had been played constantly by jazz elves while I slept, as some kind of weird music-hypnosis therapy. This happened quite early on Saturday morning, when I couldn’t get a Gerry Mulligan record called JERU out of my head even while half asleep. There was nothing …
One thing leads to another and my recent post about trombonist Eddie Bert touched on the drumming of Osie Johnson, which got me to thinking about him and listening again to some of the many records he played on. I’ve been thinking of writing something on him for a while as he’s long been a great favourite, so here goes.
***
Both on records and in person, drummer Osie Johnson was all over the hyperactive New York jazz scene …
Lester Young and Bill Evans are two examples of the rare breed who achieved an imperishable standing in jazz by creating unique, highly influential styles. Rarer still are those who were beyond category as visionary composers who virtually invented their own musical universe, such as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.
These are one-of-a-kind geniuses though, originals who come along once in a generation, maybe even once in a lifetime. But there are mere mortals among us who achieve a similar …
“There has long been a disturbing tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as “progress”, a practice that sends the musicians who have been supplanted into the outer darkness” – Whitney Balliett.
The process so neatly described above by Mr. Balliett has bothered me for some time, though I’ve also been guilty of it myself at times, certainly when I was younger. What troubles me the most is the last part about older musicians being …
Ben Webster fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins’ ground-breaking tenor saxophone style early in his career, but eventually discovered himself and largely formed his own style by about 1938. Shortly after this he found a setting as perfect for him as the Count Basie band was for Lester Young – the Duke Ellington Orchestra, from 1940-43. His time with Ellington and especially the exposure to Johnny Hodges further shaped him. Hawkins may have been Webster’s original model, but Hodges …
It’s sort of funny, but because I played bass for ten years in Rob McConnell’s big band The Boss Brass (and later, about another decade in his Tentette), some people may think of me as this ace big band bass guy. I suppose it makes sense in a way, they were both very good bands and playing in them became part of my skill set and profile. For sure, I learned a lot about playing in big bands from being …
The invaluable Spanish jazz-reissue company Fresh Sound Records recently entered new territory by out-doing itself with a huge 11-disc reissue called The Keynote Jazz Collection, 1941-47. With a whopping 243 titles performed by 62 different bands, it’s a massive compilation of music from one of the key (no pun intended) independent New York jazz labels of those years – Keynote Records. It offers a stunning cross-section of 1940s jazz in all its various styles, during a time when the music …
No, this is not another post about food, I swear. The title of this essay is a pun I couldn’t resist, which I’ll explain. There’s an old expression in jazz that when a band is swinging, really cooking as it were, they “have the pots on.” This certainly applies to The Jazz Soul of Porgy & Bess, a wonderful 1959 big band recording of Gershwin’s folk-opera, written by the D.C.-based arranger Bill Potts. It features an all-star cast of the …
The series continues with a look at the fine veteran West Coast bassist Buddy Clark, and two very good, mostly unknown bassists: Don Prell and William Austin, whose careers were almost as brief and obscure as Gary Mapp’s, but not quite.
3. Buddy Clark – Buddy Clark was a very good bassist on the L.A. scene from the early ’50s on into the ’80s, who’s often overlooked. He’s become a favourite of mine in random, incremental installments through the years …
On Saturday night after an all-day visit, my wife Anna and I dropped our daughter-in-law Sarah and one-year old grandson Charlie off at their place in the west end. We were tired but in a great mood, they’re just so much fun to hang out with and Charlie has all kinds of new stuff going on. He’s walking now (kinda like Frankenstein sometimes) and has a lot of funny faces, some new laughs and games. He’s saying a few words, …
6. Billie Holiday – May 24, 1947 – Carnegie Hall
This wonderful, short set comes from an early Norman Granz Jazz At the Philharmonic concert. Apart from her immortal Columbia recordings with Teddy Wilson, Lester Young et al in the late 1930s, these are the Holiday sides I find myself turning to most often. She does just four songs here – “You’d Better Go Now”, “You’re Driving Me Crazy”, “There Is No Greater Love” and “I Cover the Waterfront”. Each …
Jazz history is full of celebrated examples of brilliant improvisation – the 1928 Louis Armstrong-Earl Hines duet “Weather Bird”, Charlie Parker’s solo on “Ko-Ko”, the 1939 reading of “Body and Soul” by Coleman Hawkins are obvious cases, where an artist or band sets a new standard or at least reaches rare heights. But such evaluations are only possible because the performances themselves have been preserved and codified by virtue of having been recorded, otherwise they would be long gone and …
The brilliant musician Mel Powell had a jazz career unlike any other I can think of. It had a stop and start, double-life quality with very long gaps, none of which were caused by the usual problems of drug addiction, imprisonment, alcoholism or nervous breakdowns. He was so prodigiously gifted that he was torn between jazz – as a top-flight pianist/arranger – and the world of “straight” music, where he was a respected composer of modern classical music (eventually winning …
I heard a cardinal in high-fidelity just as I left my house the other morning – “bwordy, bwordy, bwordy” echoing down the street. The trees being still bare, it was easy to spot him by following the song – he was up in the top of a maple about forty yards away. As he shifted briefly from one branch to another, the light caught him at just the right angle, bringing a brilliant rush of crimson even at that distance. …