In connection with the post on The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess, I wanted to include some more general commentary on jazz and big bands, some of it personal and involving my very early days as a jazz fan and player. As that piece was overly long, I’ll take up the subject again here.

Big bands are not for everybody, they sometimes form a dividing line in jazz not unlike Dixieland. By this I mean that there …

These are notes I wanted to include in the post “Keynote Address”, but felt it was long enough as it was.

[1].  Alfred Lion arrived in New York in 1929, but health issues forced his return to Germany soon thereafter. He worked in South America from 1933 and would return to New York in 1938, in time to hear John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts of 1938 and ’39, which inspired him to found his own label. His …

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 …

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 …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYnmSAtZuB0#t=366/
Hi and Happy New Year to everyone. A friend sent me the above YouTube clip and it knocked me out so much I wanted to share it with all of you. It seems to be from a 1959 Playboy jazz special, but fortunately that leering creep Hugh Hefner has limited screen time and there’s a very young Tony Bennett among the guests, smoking away like everybody else. First off there’s Annie Ross, who gets up and sings “Twisted”, …

The soprano saxophone has had a fairly schizoid history as an instrument and this is fitting, because it comes in two completely different forms. There’s the straight one, which looks like a slightly bloated clarinet that’s been dipped in brass. And the curved one, which looks like a miniature alto saxophone, to be used as a kid’s toy or as a prop in a staging of Gulliver’s Travels. As alto saxophonist Campbell Ryga (more on him later) puts it, …

There are certain pieces of music which stick in our minds for hours or even days and often these so-called ear-worms are unwelcome, as we chance to hear a snippet of something we don’t even like and it just won’t leave us alone, goddamnit. I’m very suggestible in this way, sometimes all it takes is for somebody to mention an old TV show or movie and suddenly my inner jukebox kicks in and I have the theme from “Green …

On a recent gig there were some requests for autumn songs – “Autumn Leaves”‘ naturally, which never goes away but I never tire of either, as long as it’s not played too fast. Its imperishable structure and cyclical chords make it a great vehicle for blowing, plus people know and like it. Also “Autumn In New York”, which is maybe the best of this lot, a masterpiece with the great line describing Manhattan’s streets as “canyons of steel”.

“Autumn …

They might be called jazz serendipity, those odd moments when out of the blue (and often out of context), you chance to hear a great jazz performance and it simply takes your head off, you’re just gone, palpably reminded of how great and uplifting this music can be.

I had the strangest one of these one summer night after a gig, quite a few years ago. I can almost pinpoint the time because I was working at The Senator …

“It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place….”

It was just the four of us, fairly late Wednesday night – John Loach and his trumpet, John Alcorn singing without a mic, Mark Eisenman at the keys and me on bass – huddled around the piano at Loach’s place in a tight circle, playing a few “good old good ones”, the songs of our lives, making music for our own pleasure. It was all about the mood and …

The series continues with a look at four bassists who had prolific freelance careers mostly in the mainstream, small-group swing field – John Simmons, Al Hall, Al Lucas and Gene Ramey. These men were born within five years of each other and their careers often overlapped and intersected in the patchwork quilt of New York jazz in the 1940s and ’50s. Sometimes, one would replace another with a given artist; for example, each of them played and recorded extensively …

Recently I got into a discussion with two female library colleagues who are my age, about the young of today and some of their customs and….. “idioms”. You know….Who Bruno Mars is (which they knew but I didn’t.) How Facebook is rapidly becoming old-hat and being replaced by things like Instagram and Snapchat. The preponderance of ghastly plaid shorts and stupid, undersized straw fedoras on young men. How old words like “hip”, “cool” and “hipster” have become co-opted by …

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 …

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 …

Our look at unsung bassists continues with Tommy Williams, who mostly played with the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet and is not to be confused with the more recent jazz bassist Thomas Williams or Tommy Williams, the rock guy.

2. Tommy Williams – I’d been heavily involved with jazz – reading about it, listening to it, playing it – for about 25 years before I first came across the bass playing of Tommy Williams and I won’t soon forget it. …

The recent post about the mostly forgotten bassist Billy Taylor got me to thinking of other under-recognized ones, of which there have been no shortage through the years. So here’s a look at a few other bass players who were never even close to being household names, despite playing very well. First though, a comic rant on the overuse of the word “underrated” in jazz.

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I was going to call this article “Underrated Bassists”, but it occurred to …

In the wilting heat of these dog days I thought we could use a little comic diversion, so here’s one of the games jazz guys play on the road when things get boring, which is often enough. The idea is to make up an imaginary band of musicians whose names are onomatopoeic – yes, I realize that’s an awfully big word for a bass player. You know, puns for the instruments they play – and how they play them …

I’ve become friends with one of the reference librarians in the Great Library where I work, partly because she’s interested in music of all kinds. She’s played the piano most of her life and sung in choirs; she also does some Latin dancing, so music is about as important to her as it is to me. We’ve taken to trading CDs back and forth and recently I left four jazz ones on her desk with an email explaining them. …

Since Ed Bickert retired from playing guitar around 2002, his place in a couple of bands I play in – the Mike Murley Trio and the Barry Elmes Quintet – has been taken by Reg Schwager. It speaks volumes for Reg that these were quite seamless transitions; replacing Ed’s unique playing would normally be impossible and generally, his absence has left a sizeable hole on the Canadian jazz scene at large. The Elmes Quintet has released several records with …

The following is kind of a funny story about the production of TEST OF TIME, the CD by Mike Murley’s erstwhile trio (a.k.a. Murley-Bickert-Wallace) which just won the Juno Award in the “Best Traditional Jazz” category, whatever that means.  (It used to sort of mean jazz involving straw hats, banjos and/or clarinets, street names from New Orleans and old drunk guys, but I think these days it mostly means jazz with songs you might actually know and maybe even …

It was pretty common practice in the 1930s and ’40s to simply borrow a famous (or even obscure) theme from a classical composition and turn it into a popular song, its composer being conveniently dead and thus incapable of suing or collecting royalties.  The music business powers of the day weren’t too shy about this kind of thing (they’re even worse now) and it’s surprising how many of these hybrids have entered the jazz repertoire and are trotted out …

I have this odd habit of combining dental appointments with CD shopping.  I know it sounds weird, but there’s actually a method to my madness.  My favourite record store – Atelier Grigorian – is on Yorkville Ave. just around the corner from my dentist.  So after blowing good money on having my teeth cleaned every three months, I wash away the fluoride taste by spending some dough on something I actually enjoy, jazz records.  It’s kind of a pain-pleasure …

9.  Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane – Nov. 29, 1957 – Carnegie Hall

The 2005 issue of these two stupendous sets from Carnegie Hall allowed listeners to at long last properly hear Monk’s legendary “Five Spot” band at its peak, making this Smithsonian discovery one of the most significant in the history of jazz.  Before getting to the music itself though, a discussion of why the Five Spot gig was so important to the careers of Monk and Coltrane …

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”.  …

3.  Don Byas and Slam Stewart – June 9, 1945 – Town Hall

This one is truly incredible, a once-only, bravura performance of two up-tempo numbers by the unusual duet of tenor saxophone and bass.  Both these jazz masters were in towering form and thank goodness it was recorded.

The occasion was a concert put on by one Baron Timmie Rosencrantz, an eccentric and somewhat wealthy Danish emigré who was a writer and sometime salesman for the Commodore Music …

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 …

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Alberta and have come to understand this ambivalence recently – I don’t care much for Calgary, but I do like Edmonton.  Calgary is very head-office, a button-down, corporate oil town with all the character of drywall.  Edmonton though is funkier and more interesting, with a much stronger arts and culture presence, which was hammered home for me this past weekend.  “The Flying Beavers”, as I’ve dubbed the trio of John Alcorn, Reg Schwager …

A nicely edited version of this piece can be seen at: http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/11/Ed-Bickert-the-Gary-Cooper-of-Canadian-jazz

This story concerns the guitarist Ed Bickert, who’s had a huge impact on jazz in Canada and certainly on me and other musicians of my generation who came up listening to and playing with him as an elder statesman.  A lot of this will be written in the past tense, which doesn’t feel quite right because Ed is thankfully still very much well and among us.  On …

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 …

Although not all bad music is funny, few things are funnier than really awful  – as opposed to merely mundane – music. Provided, of course, that it was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place.  You know, musical bloopers, clams, kacks, orchestral train wrecks, blown lyrics and so on.  I’ve had a ringside seat on various bandstands for many of these over the years, which has no doubt warped my taste and judgement.  I suppose the …

Tax season is never a fun time for musicians, or anyone else for that matter. But for me, this annual April bother is always tempered by the memories it brings of Bob Price, who was a very fine jazz bassist, a wonderful guy and an accountant to boot. He’s been gone a while now and I always feel the pang of missing him in early spring, but it’s also pleasant to remember him and how lucky we were to …

The stylish singer John Alcorn launched a series of Wednesday night musical offerings this week at the Flying Beaver Pubaret (488 Parliament St.), accompanied by Reg Schwager on guitar and yours truly on bass.  John is calling this the Songbook Series; each week he will be presenting two sets of songs by a different major contributor to the GAS (Great American Songbook), kicking things off with fifteen of Cole Porter’s best.  I promise this will be the last of …